Clauses

when asked to get into it
when told not to care
when the committee asks
if I’m planning to have
children before
when told to speak up
when told to take it easy
when asked why
do I care
so much

when taken aside
when asked
(in a whisper)
if I was offended

when they don’t ask me to join
just because

when a man uses air quotes
around feminism

when a friend asks the barista
to make her iced coffee the color
of my forearm,
not the lighter inside—
the outside, it’s perfect.

when a friend asks about ass fetishes and Latinos
when the editor asks me to tone it down
when the editor asks me to spice it up

when asked if I’m okay

This poem begins our month-long celebration of
Hispanic Heritage Month here at Aquifer.
Watch for our print feature in the fall issue as well.

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Silence Is a Language I Cannot Reset

The Mycelium of Memory

The announcement comes over the intercom as I am spelling out words at my desk. Or it is a math quiz. Or it is a blank paper. I am in the front row of the classroom and when the principal’s voice comes pinging into the room I stare up at the bright yellow and royal blue borders that adorn the bulletin boards. Her name is Mrs. Jones. I put my pencil down because everyone must pay attention when the principal speaks.

“There has been an attack against the United States,” Mrs. Jones says.

The pencil on my desk has absurd ridges, and I feel them with my fingertips. Metal and rubber and wood are all tastes my tongue knows. I put the pencil in my mouth.

The teacher rolls in a boxy TV on a tall metal cart and we watch the towers smoking. This does not happen, but the images of the towers smoking, of the planes crashing into the buildings, of the towers falling inundate the media for the weeks to follow. It drenches the surrounding time and leaves imposing stains. Many of my memories hold metal shrapnel and ash.

My memories of that time also contain Tyler. We are friends when the towers fall. He is the boy who lives down the street. Friends well before; for as long as I can remember. In the spring he plays baseball; I played soccer once in kindergarten but was too shy to take the field. We play whiffle ball in the gas line easement across the street from my house or in an imagined triangle in his backyard. I am a year older, but I happily do whatever he says. There is a hierarchy to our friendship, and my role is the slavish sidekick, servile, always with a yes on my tongue. I am a mother doting on my child, attending, supporting, yielding. He is spoiled and easily riled. I do everything I can to keep him appeased.

We play videogames together in his basement and mine. We have Nintendo 64s and we play Diddy Kong Racing and Mario Cart 64, blast each other with egg-shooting birds on Banjo-Tooie. We ride bikes through the neighborhood, pass through the forested short-cut, and buy sodas from the Wal-Mart vending machines. A friendship large like skyscrapers, encompassing my childhood; monolith never expecting crash.

Introduction to Life Simulation

In 2002, I live with a purple Nintendo Gamecube controller in my hand. Nine years old and one year into the post-9/11 world my mom buys my brothers and me a copy of Animal Crossing. It comes out just four days after 9/11 in Japan, but it doesn’t hit US shelves until the next year.

On the front of the box, there is a two-story house: animals lean out of each window waving, and a human pops out of the front door. A sign above the house reads: Welcome to Animal Crossing. Inside, there is the small Gamecube disk and a limited-edition memory card with a sweater-clad cat.

Animal Crossing is a life simulation game. You are a human who moves to a new village populated by humanoid animals. You buy a house on loan and pay it back slowly. You can chat with your neighbors and do favors for them. You can collect shells, furniture, fossils, fish, bugs, paintings. There are special visitors who come every week. The seasons change: it rains, it snows, the trees bloom pink in spring. There are things to do—almost an infinity of them.

It is a single-player game, so my brothers and I have to split our playtime. One person plays while the others watch with varying degrees of impatience. Our mom bequeaths her stove timer for the purpose of resolving any disputes.

In the town I share with my twin brother Jared, I make a male character named Justin and choose the house with the yellow roof for him. The male characters wear round hats with horns coming out the sides. The hats change color and design to match the shirt you wear. Justin likes to collect fossils and display them in his house. He also likes the Spooky Series (a matching, pumpkin-themed furniture set, carpet, and wall paper), the Blue Series, and fruit-shaped furniture.

The first memory card I own for myself, I make another Animal Crossing town and populate it with all female characters: Hannah, Lily, and Anne. The women’s hats are conical like a princess’s costume prop. They have round brown eyes with long lower lashes or sparkly black eyes with wingtip lashes. They love the Citrus Set, tulip chairs, fish from dainty pop-eyed goldfish to giant coelacanths, and the Green Series with its cute check patterns. For all the characters I restart the facial feature selection process until their eyes and faces are just right. I want them to perfectly embody me. I love being all of them, though Hannah is my favorite.

Tyler also has Animal Crossing and my brother, Jared, and I go to his house and play in rotating shifts. There are some in-game NES consoles that can be played with two players, and we switch between the three of us. Or, sometimes, it is just me and him and we switch on and off. I like to be helpful. I clean his room once while he fishes in the large, river-fed pond, imagining that I am cleaning up an Animal Crossing house.

His mom comes downstairs and sees the cleaned room and gives me a complimenting smile. “Wow, what a good friend!” she says. She is always friendly, and I want her approval. “I could sure use your help around here.”

I want to be her perfect son. Her perfect daughter. The perfect child.

We plant flowers. We swap fruit. We sail to a tropical island on the dingy of a crusty sea turtle.

I am so excited for life. There are no ash clouds. There are no towers falling. I spend summers playing how I want to live.

Animal Years

I tell myself I am a red snapper aficionado. Jared rolls his eyes. I fish five of the seven fish out of the ocean against the algorithms’ odds. They are worth 3000 bells a piece. I collect gyroids, K.K. Slider songs, fossils I have dug from the star-shaped marks in the ground. My most prized possessions are my collection of turkey-themed furniture with matching wallpaper and carpet.

I spend hours a day during the summer playing Animal Crossing. There are bugs to catch, rare clothes and art to fill wardrobes. The kitchen timer goes by the wayside. I spend three hours hounding the neighbors for favors to do, I clean out the town dump, check the lost and found at the police station, sell fruit and shells. I walk around and around with nothing to do. My eyes ache from the brightness of the screen. The timer’s beeped three times, but I refuse to forfeit my controller.

The September 11 attacks change things before I know any different. A disparity between the life simulated in Animal Crossing and the life represented on TV begins to open. Years pass and the United States begins undeclared wars against countries in the Middle East. My oldest brother starts locking his things away behind a closed bedroom door. He is diagnosed in the 99^th percentile for anxiety, something my parents say I must never speak of. We are all uncertain. I begin to quiet. There are mechanisms in my life that are moving beyond my comprehension and control. But, being a simple, quiet cog is manageable, expected. It is easier for everyone.

Around this time, Animal Crossing codes begin appearing in issues of Nintendo Power which my oldest brother has a subscription to. The codes unlock exclusive Mario-themed furniture décor. But neither Jared nor I is allowed to bother him in the slightest. And we are definitely not allowed to go in his room.

The call of the codes is too alluring. From reconnaissance I know he keeps his Nintendo Power magazines in the bottom of his closet. I wait until he is playing videogames downstairs and my parents are not lurking about to sneak into his room and prowl through the pages.

His room is dark with the blinds drawn during the afternoon. On the walls is a constellation wallpaper. I creep across the dark wood floorboards, halting when one creaks. The closet doors open like theatre curtains. On the floor, there are a few magazine organizers. I sift through the magazines with a constant eye on the door. The codes section is toward the back and I look for the familiar yellow text box. The first magazine is one I have already harvested the code from. The next one, too. I fumble through them, heartbeat racing, the breath caught in my throat. I find the latest magazine with a brand new code. I print the letters and numbers plainly on yellow, lined paper. With the secrets in hand, I sneak out and close the door behind me.

Later Jared and I take turns unlocking items from Tom Nook.

Tom Nook says: “Then tell me the password.”

I whisper the tedious codes to Nook, twenty-eight characters each.

“I see, I see,” he says.

Out of his pocket he pulls wrapped presents and passes them to me. The small boxes contain impossible wonders: huge flagpoles, glowing stars, fire flowers, coin blocks, bullet bill cannons.

After we claim our prizes we destroy the codes, tearing them into tiny pieces.

The US declares war in Iraq. I wonder if it will still be going on when I am old enough to be drafted, if I will have to kill people, if I will be killed. I am not aware enough to wonder about the people who have already been killed by military action so far away from the stability of Kentucky. Thousands of civilians killed in countries that, in my ignorance, I can’t even find on a map as life carries on here just the same.

The Infinity Pocket

Your pockets store a ridiculous quantity of items in Animal Crossing. You can carry thirty six-foot long living coelacanths or thirty ebony grand pianos or thirty four-poster beds. The pocket is a mysterious place. You walk around with tons of items without any sign of distress. When you put anything in your pocket it transfigures into a green leaf.

You can mail impractical items in envelopes, too. If you want you can slide a fishing rod or a pink kitchenette into a standard envelope and mail it to your neighbor.

The media reports that the United States is at war, but not officially. It is Afghanistan. It is Iraq. It is whatever country, whatever group we are fighting. It is a fierce debate what we are fighting for. In the eighth grade, our parents have to sign a permission slip so that we can watch a documentary on 9/11. We sit in the classroom, gathered around a TV on a metal cart.

I remember clearly the pixilated blobs tumbling out of the building, down and down. I see the hovering bodies stuck mid-plunge, their faces obscured, choked with smoke, flushed suddenly with all of that fresh, breathtaking air. The Falling Man appears, their human body signing a four or a nine. The body has a mouth with a voice lost in vacuity of falling.

Tyler has a friend who lives at the end of his street named Hussain who we play with sometimes and ride bikes with on his street. His family is the only Muslim family I know living in our neighborhood. On Halloweens, they have their front porch light on, but on their door they have a sign explaining that they are a Muslim family and that they do not celebrate Halloween. The Halloweens after 9/11 their front porch light is never on. Hussain never comes to play at Tyler’s house. Their entire family retreats as if into the infinity pocket. I imagine now the fear they must have felt in the sea of white faces. And I, a white child, fail to ask a single question. I recognize now the privilege and racism holding my tongue. Silence is a complex, intersectional language that reflects dynamics of power. Already I knew the weight of silence, but to the detriment of those around me I hadn’t realized how I too could wield absences of sound.

Tyler and I never talk about Hussain. We never speak about 9/11 or the war or what the United States is doing to countries in the Middle East. In Animal Crossing, I start a campaign against Dotty, a rabbit who wears a blue check dress. She is programmed to have a peppy attitude, and I have tired of her constant positive vibes. I wield an axe and approach Dotty. Tyler is there, next to me, watching. I go up to her and press the A button, hoping to swing. The game initiates a conversation instead. I try again and again. I just keep talking to Dotty, hearing her inane catchphrase: wee one. “I’ve seen you a lot today, wee one!”

I try other implements. The fishing rod, the shovel. Finally, I try the net. I sprint toward Dotty and fire the A button. The net falls, clunking Dotty in the face. Her eyes widen as if she has been caught off guard. Tyler laughs at the ingenuity of this tactic. The approval invigorates me. I do it again and again. After the third time, Dotty becomes sad and dark clouds crowd her skull. I want her to move out, I want her to be sad. But I am also scared. Who am I trying to imitate? Tyler’s approval in this act unnerves me.

This is a life simulation. The worst you can do is bonk your neighbors on the head with a net, but in real life there are no limitations to suffering.

There are things concealed in my pockets I do not want to touch. I do not want to contemplate the edges of the dark leaves lurking; I do not want to uncover profane items I cannot display in my house or sell to Tom Nook.

What is a human capable of carrying within them without someone noticing? Our pockets are deep. Our feelings are a torrent of green leaves. All of this baggage is so inexplicably light.

The Cost of Wishes

The waters of the Animal Crossing Wishing Well reflect my face. I am sitting on the cool flagstones in the town square, peering into the water. The face floating on the surface of the water is mine, but from when I do not know. It is shifting from me at twenty-three recovering from years of awful buzz cuts to me at eight clutching my stuffed pikachu to me at twelve with a mouth sewn shut with a bitter thread. The great tree behind the Well rustles quietly in a dark breeze. It is night, a full moon.

I am here to apologize to the Well and to ask it for forgiveness. I do not have an undeliverable item as is required by the program. I am here to apologize to the twelve-year-old me for delivering a story I promised never to tell.

In the Well is my reflection. The water obliterates the face. Always it appears an unrecognizable smear. I remember what they wanted. They wanted to be a masculine little boy—they feel the safety of it now. They know inherently it will protect them.

The moon hangs in the Well alongside spent-coin wishes and an old reflection with bubbles streaming from deep below the water and a living body staring up with wobbling, wide eyes.

Placing my hands in the Well, I reach down to you, Justin. At the bottom of the Well, you hope the darkness of the night and the water will protect your story. You have yet to learn that even silence has a language to tell its story.

Obsession

Animal Crossing is a life simulation game where there is always something to do. But after playing for three hours straight, seven days a week for a year and a half, the neighbors repeat their programmed lines. The fruit and the fish are sold. My house is redecorated and all the items in Tom Nook’s store are bought. There is nothing to do.

I have a vision of an Animal Crossing avatar standing in the middle of an acre with nothing to do, nothing to say. Every task and chore has been resolved. The avatar stands there, holding its breath. There is no need to breathe in a life simulation.

I start playing other games with Tyler. We fall heavily into Phantasy Star Online: Episodes 1 & 2. It is a completely customizable RPG with different classes of humans and androids in which you can select clothing, facial features, hair, and more. We replay the levels again and again, playing through Hard Mode, Very Hard Mode, and eventually, our crowning achievement, Ultimate Mode. I have two characters: Zelda, a FOmarl female wizard with a blue dress and long brown hair I eventually dye blonde, and Robot Version 2.0, a HUcaseal who is a tiny female android with a mighty purple body. She wields scythes and blades twice her size. Zelda is the perfect support unit who also has well-rounded weapons. Robot Version 2.0 is of the Hunter class and, being a robot, she cannot cast spells to help her team out. She dives singularly into the fray, dealing massive damage, taking devastating hits.

Something begins to shift in the dynamic between Tyler and Jared and me. He has hit us before, has yelled at us in anger. It has been our responsibility not to make him mad, not to win too many times in video games, to accept whatever he says to us without response or critique, to acquiesce. We are older; we have to be more mature. We are part of this world of anxiety, paranoia, war, and rhetoric of violence and we seek understanding for Tyler’s behavior. His tempestuousness must fit somewhere in this unrest. And if we just stay silent, the violence will stay far-off.

The eggshells we’d been tip-toeing around are all broken. Our bodies are beginning to change. Tyler demands more attention from Jared and me, but he plays Runescape and Maple Story for hours while we stare mechanically at a board game spread on the floor of his family’s computer room with sparse rotations.

Tyler’s brother is throwing balls at us while we ride bikes in my driveway, and we are throwing them back at him and at each other. We pedal away to go to Tyler’s house. I drop a ball that I’m holding, and Tyler runs over it on his bike. When I turn around, he is on the ground crying. His arm is broken. “Maybe it’s not broken,” he says through the tears. But it is swelling, and I know it is. He gets a blue cast put on it and says time and time again that we broke his arm and when he and I are alone that I broke his arm.

Tyler’s mom brings him takeout for dinner while we are playing in his basement. He thrusts his food into my hands to hold while he fishes in the paper bag for napkins. I am hungry. His dog, who I thought was outside, is too. She jumps up into the air from behind and gulps down a portion of the quesadilla. He punches me hard in the side of the head, demanding to know how I could have let that happen. I want to cry, but I can’t in front of Tyler, so I turn my head down and mutter some apology.

We are playing whiffle ball in Tyler’s backyard. His brother pitches hard and beans Jared in the eye with the ball. Jared drops the bat and begins to run home, crying. Tyler tells him to come back, that it’s not that big a deal, that it doesn’t hurt that bad, that he shouldn’t be a baby, a pansy. I run home after Jared, and Tyler and his brother follow and stand in our front yard saying they’re sorry, saying it won’t happen again, saying it was an accident, saying that it wasn’t that bad, saying we just need to come back. I hide in the house and don’t answer the door.

You Cannot Reset

Tyler moves his bedroom into the basement of his house so that he and his brother can have separate rooms. We are all getting older now and need privacy. I have to share a room with Jared so I am jealous. There is nowhere else in our house for us to sleep. Tyler has his own light wood furniture and a TV of his own. We play video games sitting on his bed.

Sometime after Jared and I have harvested all the Super Mario codes, I bring my memory card over to Tyler’s house and we sit in the basement, and I show him my Animal Crossing treasures.

He loves them. He wants them, too. He asks how I got them.

“I got the codes from my brother’s Nintendo Power magazines. I had to steal them.”

“Hey, I want them, too.”

I don’t want to upset him. But the codes are gone. Shredded up. My oldest brother has stepped up security. The last time he found me in his room, he chased me out and kicked me senseless on the floor.

“I don’t have them anymore. Jared and I got rid of them.”

“C’mon, I know you’ve still got them,” Tyler says. “Give me the codes.”

I am speechless. What else can I say? The codes are twenty-eight characters long: I don’t remember any of them let alone more than a dozen. I spent hours stealing them from my brother. I am not about to repeat that process.

Tyler views this silence as insubordination. “What do you want for them? Huh? What do you want?”

He is too physically near, so I shift away.

He punches me in the arm, grabs at my shoulder. I stand up to leave, and he pushes me. I turn in the air and land on my back. The back of my head hits the ground. I try to stand.

He pushes me to the ground again. “Is this what you want, huh? Is this what you want?”

He pulls down the front of his pants by the waistband, exposing himself repeatedly. The shorts are blue or red or white. I am scared. I do not know anything about my body. I have brought this upon myself. My head hurts from the impact with the ground.

“Huh? Is this what you want?”

If you reset without saving in Animal Crossing, you are punished the next time you play. Mr. Resetti, the vitriolic mole, springs from the ground as soon as you exit your house and berates you for irresponsibly resetting without saving. If you reset too often, he takes away your money and later he strips away your eyes and mouth leaving gaping holes where your features used to be.

I am begging for him to stop. To let me go. The wood paneling on the basement walls is dark. The carpet is white and thin. “You’re hurting me,” I say. “You’re hurting me.” The back of my head vibrates. He steps back for a moment, and I am up and scrambling, darting past his grasp, up the stairs. His mom is in the kitchen preparing a snack. I shove my shoes onto my feet, huddled by the backdoor. She says something to me, but how can I respond? I run all the way home and say nothing.

I do not think about this event. The blank space of my mind is where I place every failure I feel I made in our friendship. Every issue I have instigated.

I am his friend, silently, for two more years. Then I stop trying all together, and I let the phone calls ring when I see his number on the caller ID.

In the weeks after, before I blot the event out completely, I wonder if he would have done this to anyone else. Members of his baseball team? His brother? I am not certain. Did he recognize the subtle dissonance in my presentation way back before even I knew? Something he could comfortably victimize?

I try to reset that afternoon for a decade in my head. But Animal Crossing is a life simulation. You are conditioned not to reset. There are things that cannot be undone. Navigating the immutable programming of the past, you must adhere to the limitations of the coding.

Mr. Resetti is always there, wating, face red, ready to yell. Ready to take away my mouth.

Credits Roll

I go to school. I sit at my desk I take notes. I study. I don’t study. I smile. I deserved it. I am quiet. I am loud. I eat quietly at dinner. I am changing. I get detention and conduct referrals. I forget, I say. I deserved it. I feel my parents cannot handle what has happened—they have so many other things to worry about. I am something they do not understand now. I must be their normal child. Their child without problems. The one they confide in. I deserved it. I start running track and cross-country at school. The miles wear down my mind. My body. I deserved it, but it is forgotten, I say. I forget.

How could I be so silent?

It is strength.

It is shame.

It is incredible, incredible naivety.

Time-Travel to the Beyond

In Animal Crossing, it is 31 December 2030. I have started time-traveling, passing through multiple days in a matter of hours, mining them for their valuable interactions. Check out the furniture in Nook’s shop, scour the land and seas for fish and bugs, fossils. Track the special visitors. And then I move on to the next day. It is life in fast-forward. Days and weeks passing by in the span of an afternoon.

In this scope, life is full, teeming, hectic, demanding. The town is overrun by weeds. The villagers count the days since I last spoke to them, yellow waves of shock springing from their heads when I speak to them. It is easy to brush past them.

Peaceful, busy day after peaceful, busy day.

If life is boring, skip forward. If you need money, skip forward to summer when the bugs and fish are plentiful. If you start to think too much, skip forward and chase the next exciting thing. If you want special furniture, skip to holidays. If you want to celebrate your birthday, skip to your birthday. Celebrate decades of your birthdays. Celebrate the same birthday time and time again.

If you want a neighbor to disappear, skip forward years without speaking to them until they move out.

Open up their goodbye letter.

Do not read it.

Shred it quietly between your fingers.

Animal Crossing is a life simulation, but it is not. Under such pressure, the game falls apart, becomes tedious. I skip to 31 December 2030 because it is the last day Animal Crossing is programmed to simulate. I watch the game clock tick toward the New Year, closer and closer to the great mystery of the beyond.

What will happen on the last day when the fireworks go off? I survived Y2K. I have lived in the post-9/11 United States of America. I am paranoid. The animal neighbors are all gathered together, singing, smiling. They are either unfazed by their impending doom or unware of it. Life, even in simulation, can be cruel.

The bell rings, the announcement is made, the fireworks boom. The clock shockingly reads: 1 January 2031. Is this an unprogrammed continuation? I am amazed that something exists after.

The air is full of smoke. Tiny embers and ash flutter down. The fireworks cease. The game becomes a wintered quiet. I shrug and save the file. I open it up again. The clock reads 1 January 2030. A reset. This is the farthest extent I can run. There is no more time.

I will have to live this year again and again and again.

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What It Means to Be Alive

Dragonfly Notes: On Distance and Loss, by Anne Panning

Stillhouse Press, 2018
243 pages, paperback, $16.00

Grief takes many shapes and can change as we live through it. For author Anne Panning, grief takes the shape of a discarded Better Homes and Gardens Sewing Book, found on a neighborhood street, evoking the memory of her mother. This is where Panning’s new memoir, Dragonfly Notes: On Distance and Loss, begins. “Grief is so private that it’s hard to take it out into the world,” Panning observes as she mourns her mother’s death. The recipient of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction for her collection Super America and a Best American Essays Notable nonfiction writer five times over, Panning can capture the essence of human experience. Panning’s essays are known for being fine-tuned and attenuated to the intensity of a moment, built out of vivid and uncomfortable truths. In Dragonfly Notes, Panning collects and uses these vignettes to craft a longer story about family, regret, and the loss of her mother.

Growing up poor in Arlington, Minnesota, the oldest daughter in a family of four siblings, with an addicted father and a loving mother, Panning manages to capture what it is to question where home is and what it means to leave one’s place of origin for good. Panning faces her own family criticism, quoting her brother: “‘Everything has to be such a drama for you,’” he expresses, “‘Isn’t anything just normal, or whatever for you?’” In this moment, Panning addresses a central aim of this book, which is to probe her family history in order to understand the loss of her mother. Her memoir answers her brother’s question easily, adeptly: No.

There is a symbolic mechanism that brings the memoir together, the “segmentation” of its structure, as Panning may call it, or the quilting together of titled sections that form the larger whole. Sections are not in chronological order, revealing Panning’s ability to shift into new time and geographical place naturally, as though she is having a conversation with us. Panning, like her mother, collects things throughout the memoir, and it is notable that the book, like her mother’s acts of accumulating fabric for making Panning’s childhood wardrobe, is carefully sewn from its sections.

Early on, in a section called “Good Girl,” Panning wonders what made her mother stay with Panning’s father. Barb met Lowell when she was in high school, and, as Panning notes, he was already an alcoholic then. Panning lets herself ask questions to her mother that she will never get answers to. This series of questions starts to open the door to what the memoir investigates: How does abuse happen in a family, and how do we get out of it? What does it mean to stay, and what does it mean to leave?

There is a dynamic relationship between Panning’s unflinching approach to her past and her lyricism in describing her parents’ home. Of the distressed Victorian her parents owned, she describes “the upstairs bathroom that our mother had made cozy by wallpapering the sloped wall over the tub in a tiny floral print, painting the vanity and chair a soft, strawberry pink, and glazing flower patterns on the side of the claw-foot tub. It still smelled like her Caress soap.”

Then, in a section titled “Hijacked,” Panning’s anger appears. After Panning introduces her family to her fiancé, whom she identifies as the healthiest relationship she has ever had, her mother asks her to reconsider the wedding. Panning remembers her mother saying through the phone line, “‘I mean, it’s not like he abuses you or anything, but he seems to sort of dictate how thing go in an abusive way.’” Panning, fierce as ever, responds with vehemence in the exchange, telling her mother, “‘You wouldn’t know a good relationship if it hit you in the face!’” And she goes on. What makes these moments so real is how vulnerable and honest Panning is.

The memoir finds its center in a Minnesota hospital with all of Panning’s siblings, waiting after the last of a series of incomplete and failed surgeries her mother has endured. With her mother on life support, Panning circles scenes with humor (eating Harry Potter Jelly Belly jelly beans with her siblings) and ends them with emotional heft (her father’s inability to stop the alarm going off on his wristwatch while getting very bad news). Throughout this section, the strengths of Panning’s writing are revealed: We can hear the potato chip bag crinkle under the weight of her father’s mindless snacking, we can see Panning trying to sing to her vacant mother in her hospital bed.

As the memoir ends, Panning must face her ordinary life. It’s almost as if she doesn’t want to let go, because doing so fades the memories of her mother. In mourning, Panning puts her energy into the writing workshop she’s teaching at SUNY Brockport, where I myself took classes with her (not the one she recounts). In a nonfiction class I took with her, she guided us to figure out the point of an essay by asking “So what?” At the end of her memoir, she asks, “I have parasailed in Malaysia—so what?” Her memoir easily answers the so-what question, and, in fact, there are many answers to that question in this powerful, necessary nonfiction work. Because this memoir will help readers feel hope if they are in abusive relationships. Because this memoir will help people grieve. Because this memoir will teach readers that it’s okay to be as raw and as vulnerable as you can be, as long as you are being honest. This memoir gives to its readers a sense of what forgiveness, grief, and living fully, all at once, can mean to a person. This memoir needs to be read as a vital voice in nonfiction, a voice that empowers, challenges, and gives comfort to those experiencing what it means to be alive.

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Reunion Ode

Do I know you, old friend? You were taken

off our asphalt ballgame expanse

where Sorrento and Parma roads met

before we were ten, to the North,

Edmonton, off my map of the world,

before Oswald shot Kennedy. Then,

you’ve told me, it was 40 below

when you landed without a coat, and found

that town’s kids could be heartless

as Philly’s where I stayed with Robert’s

and Elliott’s fists in my face. No escape

for either of us. Maybe you had more

boredom up in that numbing cold,

a near-paralytic stillness of frozen

lakes, cruel monotony of conifers

far as the mind could wander, a father

who knew only to quietly toughen you,

thicken your hide, and couldn’t. Maybe

I wound up more anaesthetized

by barrage, the din of the Market

Street pinball arcades, the ringing

thunder of bowling balls smashing

the pins under 54^th Street, under

the roar of the one massive hungry kvetch

in the delicatessen above the lanes,

the howl of the great complaint

that was the real American anthem,

deafening song of never enough

belonging. I’d drift to its screech

refrains on the El down to 69^th. How

was it for you? And do you know me,

after all these seasons, your silences

lonely as endless tundra, my screaming

riots of rights marches and acid rock

horror shows? Can we be the friends

we are? You’ve welcomed me

into your house, I see the boy

in the lift of your brow, that considerate

set of your mouth you learned

from your mother, and how you wait

for the kid’s heart to come out and color

the keys when you’re about to play

something for us on piano. You must

pick up on my frightened original

innocence in the blurt-and-pause

of my city-punk talk. And yesterday

when we ambled along the shore toward the old

observatory you showed me, I heard you

wonder as purely as who you were

when we sat on the swings in my yard

and joked, both of us already lost

forever, bedazzled alike under sky

wider than thought, secretly jazzed

to be recognized by one another.

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Interview: Danez Smith

Danez Smith was born St. Paul, Minnesota. They are the author of two poetry collections, Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf, 2017) and [insert] boy (YesYes, 2014), winner of the Lambda Literary Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and are working on their third. Smith is also the author of the chapbooks Black Movie (Button Poetry, 2017) and hands on ya knees (Penmanship Books, 2013). It was while a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that Smith first discovered poetry through the arts program First Wave. Smith earned a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where they were a First Wave Urban Arts Scholar. They are a co-host of the Poetry Foundation’s podcast, VS. The following interview with Smith took place at the Miami Book Fair in November 2017. Please also see Janine Harrison’s Aquifer review of Don’t Call Us Dead.

Judith Roney for The Florida Review:

I dove into Don’t Call Us Dead with mega-enthusiasm because when I was handed the list of poets I’d be interviewing here at the Miami Book Fair because I have taught your poem “alternate names for black boys” in the protest-poetry section of my intro to poetry class. It’s a great poem to teach for so many reasons. It relies on this list of names, in the body of the poem, which are not names at all, but images, which is the point. It shows students how this poet, you, totally trusts the images to do the work, and I struggle to teach our young poets this form of trust.

Smith:

It’s hard, it’s hard. You know, I was teaching a workshop the other day, and everybody was so caught up in talking content and asking, What do you think of this poem? And talking about it as if it’s a story that somebody just told, and I’m like, No, where are the images, what makes you actually like the poem? I’d been writing a lot of poems about black boys, about police violence, about the many violences America throws at the black body, and I think I got to a point where I could no longer tell the story, I just had to curate the images, to let everybody else tell it to themselves.

TFR:

I like that term, “curate.” I’ll continue to teach the poem, and it makes it so much more exciting to teach it after meeting the poet and to talk about your concept of “curating the images.” About 50 percent of my students are writing about police violence. Many of my students are in that age range of about twenty-five or younger. I’m not going to ask your age—

Smith:

Twenty-eight.

TFR:

How people view the police has changed, and so the culture changes. We all know poetry should try to disrupt, and make changes, and nudge people from their comfort zones, and obviously you’re doing that, clearly, in terms of your writing as well as your performances of slam poetry and your recordings. What do you see as hoping it’s going to accomplish, and will in the future—the poetry—and continue to do so, and with media?

Smith:

I think poetry’s goal has long been to distill something in the human (uniquely human), and the human is often beautiful, but it can be ugly and political as well. Our humanity is an ugly and gorgeous thing. I just hope that people read and that we have a diverse readership. It’s just not about inspiring a next generation of poets, but also making creative poems that inspire the next generation of policy makers, that inspire the teachers, the lawmakers, the educators, the shakers, and the movers, and everybody that makes up our society. To make poems that push the world by pushing the readers, and by offering them something, that some bit of language that can better seed the word in their world, or with words that better describe it. I hope to put into language what I know I feel, and maybe to help other people find some way of being, of seeing, of moving forward.

TFR:

And that language is like magic.

Smith:

Language is magic, yeah. But this language is not high; I think I’m trying better to bridge those two worlds. I want my poems to sound more like me.

But there are many me’s. I think poets always randomly say some high-lyrical jargon off the cuff [laughter] because we’re not even trying [to connect], but poetry for me is most interesting when it encompasses all the language that our world holds.

TFR:

The form of your poem “litany with blood all over” fascinates me. This to me is so powerful: “my blood, his blood, my blood, his blood, over and over” because it works as such a visual object as well. When you say that you’re not just reaching out to young poets, or young students, but across ages that’s great but difficult. I’m fifty-six and grew up in Chicago, but I have a totally different mindset than a lot of other people from where I live now. If I showed my neighbor, for example, a poem, it would mean nothing to him. I struggle to reach those people. Tell me what went through your mind, when working on this, it seems so full of emotion.

Smith:

I think there’s a certain point where a poem decides it wants to break out of some type of a traditional way of being on the page—I became aware of this studying poets like Duriel E. Harris, like Evie Shockley, like Douglas Kearney—and with this poem I reached a point where I had said everything I could say, and what actually needed to come out was something more visual and less legible, but full of emotion.

TFR:

There’s also a powerful rhythm to read this—“my blood, his blood” from the poem we spoke of earlier, “litany with blood all over”—repeatedly, over and over with its powerful visual overlapping like a spell—I don’t know what else to call it. I suppose you could find a powerful way in a straight-form line, but to me this is so powerful that you did it like this.

Smith:

It had to be like that—

TFR:

It had to be it like that?

Smith:

Yes—the poem wants to start breaking out of the traditional strategy for lineation. Even other poems are kind of wonky, where, you know, poets get rather tab-happy, with the tab button on their computer and sort of start pushing lines to the other side of the page for no reason [laughter]. That’s the kind of stuff I start playing with—

TFR:

Tab-happy?!

Smith:

I don’t know what that’s called, so I just call it “tab-happy.”

I’m just like, okay, you wrote a poem and you decided want it to be all over the place, and that’s fine. I love those poems, I write those poems all the time.

Tab-happy sounds so fun—but I think even when the poem is hard—“litany with blood all over” is a very serious and sad poem—but still there has to be an element of play within the writing process, I believe, even when you’re writing about possibly traumatic, or serious, sad, melancholy, depressive, what-have-you topics.

In that moment of trying to figure out how to make this my blood, his blood, this overlapping of language and blood, I think I found a way to lift above language and it actually just becomes the blood on the page. Here’s a moment of play. I remember becoming very excited trying to figure out how I was going to do this. I started writing “my blood my blood his blood his blood” and thinking I wanted this to crash together—How do I merge these things? That part just becomes fun, you start getting into Microsoft Word or InDesign and just have fun.

TFR:

When did you know you were going to be a poet, when did you feel you were a poet, and when did you feel—besides just expressing yourself ordinarily as a young man and a person—when did you say, This is what I want to do? What did you first read that made you excited? Or hear? Music?

Smith:

I wasn’t reading. I definitely came into poetry as an auditory tradition, oratory tradition, oral tradition. I came into poetry first, at least was first excited by it, through the oral tradition. A lot of my teachers were teaching Frost and Dickinson, and blah blah blah—well, not blah blah blah, but at the time it felt like blah blah blah—and Langston Hughes was only taught if it was February. It was spoken word, it was sort of the like Def poetry movement that happened in the early 2000s that caught me up.

TFR:

Got you—

Smith:

Yes, because at first I didn’t know poets were alive.

[laughter]

All the poets they showed us in school were dead! And so I thought poetry died with the poets—I didn’t know there were still living, breathing, poets. I’m glad to see there’s been a greater shift in the last ten-fifteen years to push living poets into the classroom, and the high school and college classrooms, and thank God for it, because for so long, I don’t know what people were thinking in the ’90s and early 2000s. It felt like nobody was actually interested in bringing in anything actually contemporary to students, and what I needed was a voice a little bit closer in, well not in age, but in “moment” to me. I heard that other poets were talking about things I cared about, not just things that happened in the past, but things that still are relevant, that still have echoes, that still have resonance today, where they were talking about today. That felt important. So, you know, I first found a little poetry then. I was always going to write poetry—I didn’t know it was a career option—and in college I was part of a hip hop and spoken word arts program called First Wave at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

I was curious—we’d have these poets come through and teach us workshops and perform, and I didn’t know how they did this. How do you pay rent and call yourself a poet? Do you have a day job? Some had a day job, some did not, and I think for me it was never a question of whether I was going to write poetry but was more a question of income, which is a very real thing for artists.

I’ve been a poet since I started being a poet at fourteen, but at a certain point I was making enough to be a poet full time.

TFR:

In one interview in 2015, you mentioned that were obsessed with intersectionality. I like hearing about what other poets’ muses are, their haunts, their obsessions. Is this still an obsession?

Smith:

Okay, I don’t know if I’d say I’m obsessed with intersectionality, I think intersectionality is in everything, intersectionality being a foundational black feminist thought that you are never just the one thing—

With my first book, I was definitely obsessed with that. What happened with [insert] boy, part of my life process with trying to build that book was trying to parse out my identity to have a section that was supposedly about blackness, to have a section about queerness, or my life as a sex worker, about my family. The fun part about that was that even as I was trying to suss these topics out, they were still bleeding into each other, still speaking to each other. I couldn’t talk about just being black. I had to talk about also being queer within that, and all these other identities I hold—

They’re all layered over each other. I think then I was kind of obsessed with the concept of intersectionality, but not so much anymore. I think now in my work intersectionality is now just a fact. I think it was something I was playing around with in my first book, and now it’s our lives, we are, all of us, we each are our many selves.

TFR:

As an identification, as a persona, when you’re writing, does it keep changing from poem to poem? You’ve moved on, so what questions do you find yourself asking questions in the newer poems?

Smith:

I think every poem is a pursuit, is a failed pursuit of an answer, but just a poem getting a little bit closer to it. I wrote [insert] boy, and I spent time with those questions, and I wrote Don’t Call Us Dead, and spent time with those questions, and now I’m writing new things and working toward my third book, and so I have questions there that I’m trying to pursue too.

TFR:

It’s great to have a book like Don’t Call Us Dead for my advanced poetry class, for studying form—students need to see these new forms, they need to have their eyes opened. I make it a point to use few, maybe one or two dead poets.

Smith:

Well, now I love Frost and Dickinson, all those folks. I love William Blake, [laughter] and Keats, and stuff like that—

TFR:

Crazy guys!

Smith:

Right, crazy guys! I find something of value in that—but it took falling in love with contemporary poetry for me to be able to reach back, and where we understand something historical of note.

TFR:

Okay, then I want to ask a last question, did it take something to unlock the door, and there you went, and you kind of exploded from there?

Smith:

I didn’t love poetry for a while, and then a professor of mine in college asked me, “Are your poems only going to be good when you’re around to read them [aloud]?” And then that’s what really changed my life and sent me to the page. Then I discovered another whole other realm of possibility of how to be a poet, and I was already in love with the concept of poetry, and it was nice to discover it also be lived in a vibrant way on the page, too, because I think that’s the thing—when I found spoken word I did not also find the contemporary written word. That came later. I knew folks were speaking poetry into the world, but I didn’t know folks were still publishing books!

TFR:

Often people who like spoken word or slam poetry don’t think about looking at it—on the page or in a book. They think this is too quiet, or “I’m not going to get it.”

Smith:

No, no, books are loud, books are loud, books are forceful.

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Someplace Better

Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith
Graywolf Press, 2017
88 pages, soft, $16.00

In their second collection, Don’t Call Us Dead, Danez Smith screams at America, particularly white America, to become woke, once and for all, instead of denying the genocide of black males via racism and homophobia. Smith’s words are so pointed and powerful, impassioned and infuriated that I cannot help but equate the poet with James Baldwin, whose writing was frequently, as stated in his essay, “The Creative Process,” a “lover’s war” with society.

In this three-part work (since named a National Book Award finalist) replete with snake, blood, burial, water, fish, black sky, and star symbolism, Smith illustrates what is possible—the frontier of form serving content—poems with segments both traditional and prose-like, that begin and end in concrete form, are epistolary, contain lines that offer colons and backslashes, that are hermit-crab, fill-in-the-blank, and crossed out. However challenging, though, the texts are accessible, a balancing act achieved throughout the book.

Smith’s words are often born in fury, as may be noted in poems that bookend the collection. In part one, “dear white america,” they make it clear that they would rather move to a new planet in danger of being sucked into a black hole than to continue to subsist on Earth. The poet asks, “… how much time do you want for your progress?” In part three, “you’re dead, america,” they make white america aware that only because of “brown folks,” “realer than any god / for them i bury whatever / this country thought it was.” Unlike the black boys buried in earlier poems, the persona buries “america,” respectfully, yet still using a lower-case “A.”

In “Summer, Somewhere,” the prologue, in which they write, “if snow fell, it’d fall black. Please don’t call / us dead, call us alive someplace better,” black men are removed from coffins as boys again, given a second chance, and “… go out for sweets & come back.” Trayvon’s new name is “RainKing.” The poet inquires, “do you know what it’s like to live on land who loves you back?” The poem, although steeped in a context of injustice, is gentle, beautiful, like listening to a dirge—a sense of relief and release created about this imaginary haven, racist and homophobic hell on earth slipping away.

One theme of the timely collection is police brutality. In the prologue, such references as “sometimes it’s they eyes who lead / scanning for bonefleshed men in blue” and that even in this alternative heaven, they still can’t shake their fears, “we wake up hands up.” When I reached “dear badge number,” still in section one, I wondered why the poet was so heavy-handed with his emphatic two-line piece, “what did i do wrong/be born? be black? meet you?” In another context, I would have criticized it for obviousness, but I realized that Smith sees the time for subtlety as long gone. Directness is needed so that white readers cannot possibly misconstrue their words.

Smith writes about homosexuality in equal measure. In “last summer of innocence,” the poet illuminates the final summer before the speaker was aware of their homosexuality. They write about homosexual dating and racism therein, and about sex itself. Tender lines come across as a love letter to black males. This work serves as orientation for what is to come: witnessing a grieving process as the poet, who has revealed publicly they are HIV+, takes readers through the agonizing stages that led to acceptance of such a diagnosis. The poem “fear of needles,” for instance, contains three centered lines written in second-person point of view, in which Smith pushes readers into a place of fear experienced by sexually active gay men:

instead of getting tested

you take a blade to your palm

hold your ear to the wound

The poet delves into the intricacies of being HIV+, discussing betrayal by partner and self, loss of future progeny, homophobic religious leaders, and even the disease as a form a genocide. They intertwine police and infected blood cells, jail sentences and HIV sentences. In the epigraph of “1 in 2,” Smith states that a 2016 CDC study revealed that one in every two black men who has sex with men will be diagnosed with HIV. They observe:

If you trace the word diagnosis back enough

you’ll find destiny

trace it forward, find diaspora

They push themselves in terms of not only content but also form throughout section two, most notably in the final poem, “litany with blood all over,” when the pain becomes so intense that the piece ends concretely as “his blood” and “my blood” increasingly mingle, becoming one, across one-and-a-half pages of type.

To call Don’t Call Us Dead “brave” would be an understatement, an insult. I wish that this collection did not exist, that there was no need. But there is, and since there is, I cannot think of a poet who could handle its subjects more deftly or with more grace and poignancy than Danez Smith.

Please also see Judith Roney’s Aquifer interview with Danez Smith.

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Stretched between Sunshine and Shadow

The Authenticity Experiment: Lessons from the Best and Worst Year of My Life, by Kate Carroll de Gutes
Two Sylvias Press, 2017
200 pages, paper, $17.00

Kate Carroll de Gutes’s debut memoir, Objects in Mirror are Closer Than They Appear, won the 2016 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, as well as the Lambda Literary Award for Memoir, and she has written another noteworthy book. Her new memoir, The Authenticity Experiment: Lessons from the Best and Worst Year of My Life, has already won an IPPY (Independent Publishers Book Award) and will speak to many readers who share the struggle between our public personas and private feelings. The book was sparked by a thought-provoking question that poet Fleda Brown posed to her online community about resisting the tendency to present life on social media as perfection, depicting beautiful children, beautiful friends, beautiful houses, even beautiful food—all of the time.

De Gutes set out to see whether or not she could intentionally share what she calls “the duality—the both/and, the light/dark—of life” for thirty consecutive days on her blog. She examines the way social media is used to “connect” with friends and acquaintances in the very moment we have a thought or a photo to share. In her work, she considers the questions: Has the immediacy of social media made us more isolated than in the days of neighbors chatting over the fence, mailing handwritten letters, and making phone calls? Has shaping a public persona overshadowed engagement in authentic human relationships?

She could not have predicted just how much her life would be stretched between the extremes of sunshine and shadow across the time-span of her experiment. Things took a dramatic shift when shortly into the #LightAndDark blog project, her mother experienced a series of strokes. Less than a month after her father died, De Gutes remembers taking her mother to a play. Her mother was having trouble keeping names and plot points straight:

I didn’t think it was Alzheimer’s then. I thought it was grief that kept her from tracking. . . who would think it was anything more than the grief of losing a spouse of forty-six years?

As the play began, my mother reached over and patted and squeezed my right hand, then let her hand linger there. Looking at this now, I see she was apologizing and thanking me in the same move. But all I felt was discomfort. My mother’s hand on mine, me standing in as spouse like I had done so many times before. I never wanted this role. Now here I was starring in it. I withdrew into myself. My mother felt it and pulled her hand away.

Then her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and eventually moved into a care facility near De Gutes. After the strokes, De Gutes and her sisters moved their mother again—from the care facility to adult foster care—in order to get the hospice care she needed. Just ten days later, she died. De Gutes made her mother’s funeral arrangements, delivered her eulogy, and closed her estate.

Within ten months, De Gutes became the primary caretaker of her close friend Steph. When cancer took her friend, De Gutes closed her estate. Then her close friend, editor Judith Kitchen of Ovenbird Press, died of cancer two days after completing the final edit on Objects in Mirror are Closer Than They Appear. Grief shook the bedrock of De Gutes’ world, and multiple aftershocks continued to leave her feeling ungrounded. At the same time, she was busy giving public readings to promote her debut memoir, winning awards and giving speeches.

Under these circumstances, De Gutes still carried on The Authenticity Experiment, trying to render an honest depiction of her day-to-day reality. Some days her post went up only minutes before midnight, but she wrote something every day for the full thirty days. This chapter, just one short paragraph, titled NEGRONI (PRN) illustrates the swiftness of change in her life and the weight of the decisions that fell on her shoulders.

I’m not sure which is harder: moving my mom to an adult foster home on the down-low so she wouldn’t continually be retraumatized when we had to keep telling her about it, or leaving her there. Which is why tonight I’m sitting at my new favorite restaurant and drinking a Negroni. I ate here two weeks ago tonight with my mom. I feel like I’ve been in one of those Progressive Insurance “Life Comes at You Fast” commercials. Was it really only two weeks ago that I had this same drink at this same table with my mom?

When the thirty-day experiment reached its conclusion, some of De Gutes’ readers didn’t want it to end. She decided to continue to write under the #DarkAndLight hash tag, posting longer essays a couple of times a week. The result is a compelling collection of skillfully written essays, which with honesty and vulnerability celebrate the resilience of the human spirit. They read like letters from a dear friend. The thread tying them together is her understanding that life is never all good, or all bad. Life is messy. Joy mingles with heartbreak:

We live in the great mess, the humus, or soil, of life—which has for its root, the same prefix as human . . . Life should be dirty, tumbling around in all the organic components that make up our lives, our living, ashes to ashes, and all that beautiful fertileness that makes us who we are.

In The Authenticity Experiment, readers are invited to bear witness as the author navigates her way through profound grief, all the while doing her best to fully experience the good things happening for her as well. De Gutes takes her readers along with her to public places, delivering acceptance speeches at award ceremonies, delivering eulogies, and into the most personal spaces, while navigating the legal system to close two estates and being engulfed by crushing emotions in unexpected places. On each step of this journey, she bids readers to consider what she learned from that impossible year—what she calls the “both/and” of our lives. How do we give ourselves permission to experience joy in the midst of grief? Where can we find enough strength to be vulnerable and stay fully engaged with our families, friends, and communities? She asks, “Everything is always both/and, isn’t it? We are alive, and we are dying. We are there, and we are here. We are confused, and in our confusion we are finally able to see clearly and sing out in our full range.”

De Gutes doesn’t offer a road map. She’s not in the business of giving advice. Still, her story teaches by example that it’s possible to pay attention and appreciate the glimmers of light that brighten even our darkest days. Sometimes it requires conscious intention.

Please also see Heidi Sell’s interview with Kate Carroll de Gutes.

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Interview: Kate Carroll de Gutes

Packing my carry-on bag for a flight to Portland, Oregon to visit my son and his husband, I ran my finger along the spines of books I’d purchased but had yet to read. I selected a memoir called Objects in Mirror are Closer Than They Appear, written by Kate Carroll de Gutes. I read the first few pages in order to weigh its merit as travel reading. I sat down to finish just the first chapter. An hour later, I had to force myself to close the book. Before tucking the book into my bag, I flipped to the author bio and learned that De Gutes lives in Portland, Oregon. This felt like kismet.

Before I could talk myself out of it, I quickly sent off an email asking her if she’d be willing to meet with me and allow me to interview her. Instinctively, I knew this author could guide me around some of the obstacles I’d been bumping into in my own efforts to write a memoir. Kate graciously agreed.

We met at Townshend’s Alberta Street Teahouse where we took up residence in a couple of chairs nestled in a back corner. For the next hour or so, we discussed the sometimes sticky challenges of writing about our lives and the people in them who didn’t necessarily sign up to become supporting actors in the stories we need to tell.

Kate Carroll de Gutes is the author of two books, Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (Ovenbird Books, 2015)—which won the 2016 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction and a 2016 Lambda Literary Award in Memoir—and The Authenticity Experiment: Lessons From the Best & Worst Year of My Life, winner of an Independent Publishing Award medal in LGBTQ Nonfiction (Two Sylvias Press, 2017). Please also see Heidi Sell’s review of The Authenticity Experiment.

Heidi Sell for The Florida Review:

You began your writing career in journalism. I’m wondering how that background informs your creative work. I’m finding there’s no shortage of people standing by to declare, “That’s not how it happened,” or “I never said that!” Since memories do indeed shape-shift over time, what strategies do you use to reconcile objective facts with subjective memory?

Kate Carroll de Gutes:

Both fiction and nonfiction are writing towards truth, but nonfiction writers are constrained by a ‘box of facts’ that they have to work within to get to the truth. I don’t make any composite characters in there. I don’t compress the timeline. I leave things out of the timeline obviously, but I don’t compress it as if ‘this all happened in one year’ kind of thing. Because I’m a real believer in facts. That’s why we read nonfiction, because we’re interested in the facts of someone’s life.

I don’t think it’s that hard to hew to fact and still get to some truth. I think you have to think awfully hard about it. How do you get there? And like you said, you have to bust through your own denial. What does that really mean? You have to bust through your anger and your pain and your shame. All of that.

TFR:

Something I keep running into is that in my own mind, some memories have morphed and merged, and I realize that couldn’t have happened that year. We didn’t live in that house when she was that old, or whatever . . . What do you do with things like that?

De Gutes:

I think you tell your reader. There’s a phrase that I use a lot in that book [Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear], which is, “But that isn’t exactly true,” or “But that can’t be true, because we didn’t live in that house then.” And sometimes I interrogate myself on the page. Is this true?

There’s an essay in the book about my dad in the Navy. I had to do a ton of research for that. I got my dad’s Naval records. I talked to people that he was in the Association of Naval Aviators with. You know, my mom had Alzheimer’s, so I couldn’t trust her memory. She said, “Your dad wasn’t an aviator.”

And I’m like, “Yeah, he was. He had his wings.”

And she says, “Yeah, he just had those. He wasn’t an aviator.”

“But he was in the Association of Naval Aviators.”

She said, “No. They let anybody in.”

TFR:

Really? Can I get in?

De Gutes:

Yes! It turns out they do let anybody in, but it also turns out my father had his wings.

I have a new essay I’m working on. I inherited the kitchen table that I grew up with, and it was, I thought, my grandparents’. My mom said, “Oh, no. That was your great-grandparents’.”

And my sisters and I were like, “You have Alzheimer’s.”

This table always squeaked, and I sent it out to be repaired, to be re-glued and all of that and when the guy came to pick it up he was like, “Oh, wow! This table’s a hundred and thirty years old, at least!”

We’d totally dismissed Mom. So, I think those are important things to tell a reader. I’d completely dismissed my mother, and it turns out this was true.

TFR:

I sometimes feel dismissed by my family that way, because I’m known for having kind of a wonky memory. So even when I’m sure I absolutely know something to be true, if they have any doubt, they just assume I’m the one who remembered it wrong. That’s something that I struggle with in trying to write my story. So I just think out loud on the page?

De Gutes:

Think out loud on the page, and also you have to remember that everybody has a different memory. You know, you’ll remember one thing from this meeting and I’ll remember another. It’s like the old car accident scene, right? Six people watch a car accident, and everybody has a different story about what happened.

That is the tricky part of memoir and that’s why, in my opinion, you always have to alert your reader. Like, “I’m imagining this. I don’t know this to be true. I think perhaps it happened this way.” I think an honest memoir writer will always alert their reader to the fact that they don’t know.

You know, my siblings remember this differently.

TFR:
Did you get a lot of push back from them?

De Gutes:

None, which I find fascinating. My dad had died by the time I finished the draft of the thesis. My mom read it. The original thesis was very different with a different ending. Her only comment was, “I don’t look very nice in this.”

I said to her what I think you should say to your family, which is, “Mom, these are just my memories, and they’re just the memories I chose to put down. It’s not the whole story.” When you’re writing about people, it’s hard.

You know, it’s like, No, I’m imposing a narrative structure. It’s okay, but people who aren’t writers don’t understand that.

TFR:

You mention in your book the generosity of your ex-wife and her current spouse in allowing you to tell your version of what happened. Did they know you were writing Objects as you were writing it, or only after you finished?

De Gutes:

My ex-wife definitely knew because we divorced while I was in graduate school. We were together twenty-four years so we had a lot of years of both reading together and talking about writing. I gave her the whole manuscript, and I said if there’s anything you object to let’s talk about it.

And she said, “I’m not even going to read it right now, because it’s your story. You tell it.”

You know, really gracious. She came to the book awards. She’s an amazing individual. And even her current partner, he’s like, “I hear I show up in the book. Do I get royalties?”

I’m said, “If you sell five thousand copies, I will send you on a cruise!”

He’s like, “All right, I’m working on it.” He’s a really good guy.

TFR:

If it hadn’t gone that way, if they’d been resistant or really upset with something you’d written, how would you have handled that?

De Gutes:

What do you do?

TFR:

Yes. Would you have gone ahead? Would you have abandoned the project?

De Gutes:

Well, that’s a great question. It’s a hypothetical, but I’m always open to change, you know? I’m sure you found my blog, which is actually becoming a book [The Authenticity Experiment]. I write about the people in my life. They all have nicknames, but my siblings were really upset about one of the posts.

And they said, “If you’re going to write about us, could you tell us and we could read it first?”

I said, “Sure.” And I actually changed a post for them. It was a simple change.

I think had my ex-wife been very upset about that I would have considered making changes. I would have considered cutting. As it was, you don’t know what happened in my marriage. That’s the biggest question I get from readers, “I don’t understand. What happened in your marriage?”

And I say, “That’s between me and my ex-wife.”

I hope I’ve told enough of the story that you’re engaged and it’s not tell-all. Nobody wants a confessional memoir, I don’t think. Read the National Enquirer for that.

TFR:

I have a blended family, so there are always these undercurrents of emotional stepfamily stuff going on. I’m trying to honor each of those stories that overlap my own, but it’s really difficult to tease apart and still tell a whole story. You talk about nonfiction writers being constrained by a ‘box of facts.’ So you use nicknames. That’s not something I’ve thought of trying, but they’d still know who they were in the book.

De Gutes:

Right, they know who they are. I write about so many people on the blog and they didn’t sign up to be friends with, or to love a nonfiction writer, so you know . . . nicknames work for them. And some people I don’t name at all.

The post that just went up, my two friends that I was with, I didn’t name them. They both contacted me and said, “That was such a great post and I’d forgotten that happened. Thank you for that great post.” Neither one said, ‘Thank you for not naming me,” but I’m careful with people.

And I think with your blended family, again, you still have to tell your story. It’s your experience of the step-kids coming in and blending them with your own children. And is all of that germane? That’s the question I ask myself, too. I write it all down. You know, I write hundreds of pages to get ten. I’m sure you do the same.

TFR:

Yes. There’s a scene that I have written again and again and again. I just can’t get it right. Part of the problem is revealing another kid’s personal crisis that was occurring in the same time frame as the event I need to write. That scene is crucial to the story, but difficult to write without exposing a painful time for our family that really isn’t relevant to the story I want to tell. Recently, I started over. Stopped trying to revise what I had already written and just started all over. This time I put everybody’s names in it, everything.

De Gutes:

Good.

TFR:

And now I’ll go back and revise again, but what do you advise in a situation where two stories are so tangled together?

De Gutes:

Well, the reality is it’s your story about it, so you don’t necessarily have to get their blessing. Right?

TFR:

That’s what I keep going back and forth about. I think of Anne Lamott who says that if people wanted you to write nice things about them, they should have behaved better.

De Gutes:

Right! Exactly, exactly! Anne Lamott will also tell you that she changes people. She uses composite characters sometimes.

TFR:

But you don’t feel comfortable doing that yourself.

De Gutes:

I don’t. I think it’s wrong. I really do. I do feel comfortable, like on the blog, giving nicknames and I also know there are some stories I can’t ever tell. There are stories I’ll never tell except for—you know—like sitting here I might tell you a story, but I’ll never write it.

But you’ve got to write this one.

TFR:

I can’t see the story without it.

De Gutes:

So I think if I were to give you any advice, I would say try writing it from a different point of view. Try writing it in third person. Try writing it in second person.

TFR:

I noticed that you use second person quite a lot, and it’s so powerful.

De Gutes:

It is. And it’s a great way to approach a scary topic. So is third person. She could tell you there were many times when she saw what was true, but chose to deny it. You know, that kind of thing, right? It’s fascinating what a change in point-of-view will do for a story. Another thing is try writing in future perfect. Using second person or third person, you know. She will tell you in 2017 that . . .

TFR:

I like that approach. I haven’t seen that in other memoirs. That’s something you did in this book that really caught my attention, that I really found to be very powerful.

De Gutes:

It happened by surprise. It happened because something was out of the timeline, and I thought, I’ve got to make this work. Oh, I’ve got to change the tense. Oh, and it’s got to be future perfect. And there’s one other one that’s future conditional.

TFR:

Future conditional. I must admit I don’t remember exactly what that means. [Laughs.]

De Gutes:

Me too. I didn’t know what to call it. There’s a great book that I always refer to called Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style by Virginia Tuft. It’s just fantastic. It’s so helpful in these situations.

TFR:

You shift those tenses throughout the book. And I guess in my head I thought that was ‘against the rules’ until I read Objects.

De Gutes:

Fuck the rules, right?

TFR:

Some of your chapters are really short. It makes me wonder about how I might use little snippets of my own that haven’t grown into anything bigger.

De Gutes:

Well, you might think about juxtaposition and how you can bump some things up against one another, because they inform each other. But sometimes a really short piece just works.

I’m also a big proponent of if you’re just writing a scene and it’s powerful and it stands on its own, then okay. I’m also a big believer in doing what works for you. Judith (Kitchen) was a big believer in working with your weaknesses. So you want to tie it up tidy, and she’s like, “Life isn’t tidy. Let’s work with that, you know?”

Your weakness is that you want to tie everything up. Let’s leave it untied. See what happens. I think it’s human nature to want to tie it all up, but you can’t.

TFR:

I think for me the trick is giving the reader a bit more trust to make their own meaning out of things instead of trying to tell them what I think it means.

De Gutes:

Right, and you never know what your readers are going to bring to the page anyway. I’m stunned when somebody tells me what they see and I think, Well, you’re right, but I wasn’t thinking that. I never saw that.

TFR:

Have you had anyone write a review of your book that you really disagreed with?

De Gutes:

No. I’ve been so lucky that I have only gotten good reviews. At least, the published reviews. There are a few on Amazon and Goodreads that . . . well, there are trolls out there. But no, I have been so, so lucky that my written reviews have all been good, and I’m really grateful for that because I know I would be kind of devastated.

TFR:

It’s tough to put yourself out there. I think most writers are introverts.

De Gutes:

Right, and sensitive little beings!

TFR:

Do you have a workshop group, a list of first readers? How do you keep yourself moving forward?

De Gutes:

I keep myself moving forward because I’m just ridiculously driven, so there’s that. I’m always writing. I always have a journal with me. I’m constantly working on something that may turn into something and may not. Like I said, I write a hundred pages to get ten.

I do all my work longhand and then type it. I have a great group of first readers that I went through graduate school with and they’re all thanked in the book—Cynthia Stewart Renee, Judith Pullman—and they’ll read anything for me, anytime. I’ll be on a deadline for something, it’ll be totally last minute, and I’ll ask, “Does anyone have time to take a look at this for me?” And they will. We do that for each other, and so they’re great first readers for me.

I have another friend who is a singer/songwriter, a storyteller, and she gives me a different kind of feedback. She’s like, “You need to take me right into the story here. I wanted to go right into the story. And I wanted to know what the cigarette smoke did to your nostrils. Did you sneeze? Did it make your eyes itch?” You know, things that other people don’t notice. Songwriters notice all these physical details.

TFR:

I wondered if there are any other writers in your family.

De Gutes:

None. Well, my grandmother’s sister, my great-aunt Bobbi. She was a writer.

TFR:

Did she have any impact or influence on your decision to go into this field?

De Gutes:

No. she died before I was born. I’ve always written. I wrote as a young kid even. It’s in my blood. Music and writing.

TFR:

And why journalism first? Over fiction or other genres, what took you there?

De Gutes:

Well, you’ve got to make a living. Right? I don’t make a living with this—teaching and selling books does not provide what I want. So, I ghost-write magazine articles and e-books and blog posts and thought leadership pieces for technology executives. It works. It’s a little draining, like I’ve got to leave here and jump on a call, but it affords some flexibility, too. I can look at my schedule and know when I can book myself out. I work for myself.

I don’t consider it ‘real writing.’ But other people say, “It’s real writing. You put words down every day.”

TFR:

Do you have other big projects in the works?

De Gutes:

The Authenticity Experiment: Lessons from the Best and Worst Year of My Life is coming out from Two Sylvias Press in September (2017). Then another project I’m working on is probably narrative nonfiction/memoir. I think it’s going to be a hybrid book on Alzheimer’s. I’ve got an agent in New York now, which is great. I’m finishing the book proposal for that, and then she’ll shop that for me. And then I’ll have to write it.

TFR:

That’s a story that’s needed.

De Gutes:

That story is needed, right? There are 65 million people right now that have Alzheimer’s. We haven’t even hit the peak of the baby boomers aging. It’s a problem.

Judith died, my best friend died, and my mother died within a ten-month period, and I had to close my friend’s estate and my mom’s estate. I delivered three eulogies and closed two estates in ten months.

TFR:

That’s life changing.

De Gutes:

Right? Objects came out in June [2015]. Judith died two days after she finished the edit on the manuscript. So my book came out in June, my friend Stef died in January, and my mom died in August.

The years 2015 and 2016 are just kind of lost years for me. I keep thinking, when did that book come out? It’s just been a year since I won the Oregon Book Award, so the massive change in the last two years of my life has been huge. You know, it’s both good and bad, which is why I started writing The Authenticity Experiment. We have to stop thinking in the binary about everything.

Life is messy and it’s both things—dark and light.

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The Void Witch

Erin knew that her only recourse was to lie. Her minimum-wage job usurped the term papers, extracurriculars, and the part-time gig scanning microfilm at her college library. It became the reason she woke up and then, later, didn’t sleep. It became a chemical gratification tethered to the smallest silver spiral in the tip cup, even as she found herself in the freezer hyperventilating over round egg patties, or rebuffing the advances of shift leaders, who cornered her against the donut display to talk about all the things their wives wouldn’t do.

Her housemates played golf and made bony, lowercase poems for course credit. They sprawled over their desks and whispered about the cock sizes of “townies,” very careful not to say black. And when Erin came home, fingers sticky with jelly and powdered sugar, they asked, why don’t you just quit?

The answer was a one-bedroom apartment in Albany where her mother worked as a freelance seamstress and hospice-care associate, and where her father, just a year before, left for a doctor’s appointment and never returned. The answer was a flirtation with the poverty line, unsubsidized student loans, and a reckless impulse to double major in two areas that were expensive exercises in vanity. Her housemates thought she was slinging crullers for club cash, but she hadn’t donned a pair of heels since junior year.

Her academic advisor called her into his office and steepled his fingers and she could see it on his face, all the plates she’d left, teetering on sagging sticks. They looked at the steady decline of her grades and apologized to each other–she, because she was one of eighty-four black students and naturally felt a responsibility to represent well the totality of her race, and he, because of a mutation of white guilt that made her personal failure his personal failure.

The college was semi-elite but a little insecure about itself, and so prone to manic email blasts about notable alumni–all of whom were white men in suspenders who made bank on conservative news condemning the scourge of black Santa.

To afford this college, and perhaps one day spoil its reputation on the strength of some minor feminist accomplishment, she cleaned the guts of the milk machine, brewed arabica until she couldn’t remove the smell from her hair, donned white gloves in the basement of the college library, and scanned old, flaked film. It was all for something. But in the middle, between the unread assigned books, the betrayal of every genus of alarm clock, and the slack bullshittery of class presentations on dopamine inhibitors and Lewis Carroll, a central part of her personality became negotiable.

That is, her long and sexless history of being a know-it-all, the sort of coy, homework-loving show-off that bummed out her own parents, who though terribly mismatched were united in their desire for a daughter who might go out at night, do some sweet, illegal thing, and bring home a boy they could hate.

So she was a smart girl. And it was on this assumption that she rationalized all failure elsewhere: the social awkwardness, the general unluckiness with boys. But it meant nothing when customers pulled knives or wrote online reviews about her stinginess with the hazelnut syrup. It meant nothing when her coworkers–locals from the damp hollows of Hyde Park—decided that she was bougie, the kind of black girl that comes from the suburbs with shiny, respectable cheeks.

It was easy to be fired because it was easy to be replaced, so she couldn’t just be sick. She couldn’t just want time off. A family member needed to die, and that family member was going to be her father. It was almost the truth. In her fevered sleep, her mother’s voice emerged, husky through a length of telephone wire. The voice said simply, your father is gone. And though her mother was pathologically calm, there was a note of panic in her voice that made Erin resolve to never forgive her father—so inconsiderate, he couldn’t skip town under the standard guise of going to get cigarettes. And now in her senior year, her father, a liar, was going to become the lie that would get her out of work.

“Comic-con,” she whispered to Alexander, a customer (medium cream, no sugar) and art school dropout who sold frosty, hydroponic weed. The first time he crashed her nightshift with his halfway smile, they were already in the middle of something. Out of his eyes circling her face as she frothed milk came a candidly transactional dynamic in which his five-dollar joe became a two thousand percent return on blueberry kush. And occasionally, her body beneath his, pliant and stoned. Initially, he spent a great deal of time trying to get her into his car, which was, she thought, the kind of car drug dealers should avoid—a monstrous, candy-painted, German exercise in masculine panic. But as she slid into a smooth, heated seat, she was charmed. By the crooked cigarette hanging incidentally from the corner of his mouth, by his haywire strawberry blond hair, nimble rolling fingers, and the almost ugly collection of consonants in his protracted, Slavic surname.

So she became a customer of her customer, and this was not an insignificant factor in the disorder of things. It was work, school, smoke, sleep. It was the sudden redaction of sleep, kind professors pulling her aside to talk about the necessary recycling of T-cells, about the sunken pupil bombing reasonable midterms with unreasonable, fever-dream scrawl.

Her mother, a rehabilitated addict, had given her a speech before her freshman year. It was all about the family history, the bright, narcotic predisposition, laced between the hemispheres of her brain. So when she got high she felt guilty. Her housemates ate the donuts she left for them at night and complained about the haze around her room. Alexander came over, rolled sticky satori in sweet grape papers, and fucked her with his shoes on.

It was Tuesday when she told him about comic-con and the lie she planned to tell to get out of work. There was a contortion of his face she thought she understood: the you fucking nerd of it all. The very palpable change in a cool person’s regard when you admit investment in the fictional, your otaku-ness becoming a sudden strain of leprosy. But they’d talked enough about video games for her to expose herself, and for him to show that he was unbothered, if not forgiving of her off-putting excitement about the old school magic of turn-based systems.

His reaction was in fact the beginning of the end of the strictly casual nature of their relationship. It happened so stealthily that she didn’t realize until he was pulling a sketchbook of unfinished drawings out of his backpack, or she was in his car on break, trying to calm down after some minor disobedience of the espresso machine. No doubt the seriousness between them was a bit of a buzzkill, but it could not be stopped. And now, after telling him about her master plan, he said, all too casually, that his mother had a very aggressive kind of lung cancer.

She was unprepared, caught between hollow words of condolence and their post-coital radioactivity, and so she said to him, wow. She said, that sucks. Ultimately, the choice of words was significantly less weird than the fact of it coming out like a question. It was a phonetic contagion that spread like wildfire throughout her sorority, a dubious, lingusitic beckiness that she’d absorbed from the campus eyebrow gods.

It was lucky he didn’t seem to be looking for any particular reaction, and as he slung on his jacket and gathered his keys, she got the feeling that it almost didn’t matter that she was there, that the objective of his confession was a thing of tongue and teeth and throat, merely an effort to see how the words hung in the air. Still, when he started avoiding her, she was secretly relieved.

She got to work on her costume. It was a cosmetic exercise that became an existential one. She came home with the tulle, spandex, and paint, and studied her naked body in the mirror. Despite the smoking and the donuts, she was somehow in the best shape of her life. In her teenage years she’d attended a handful of local cons and marveled at the diverse set of acned girls in Lycra, their colorful synthetic wigs, the unabashed cant of their hips. She’d envied their confidence, watched as they pouted and smiled for pictures, unconcerned about the girth of their thighs.

It was why Erin took the new-fangled, network-approved idea of geekdom so personally. It was why she simply could not abide the fake glasses of sexy, square-jawed men. The cachet of the outsider had evolved to include her dopey subset of pit-stained, rough-thumbed gamers and anime freaks. But it was wholly antiseptic, and the reason why was because of a complete oversight regarding the terrible, squalid shame of the thing.

There was no ghoul in a letterman jacket to mock her fanart or douse her in pig’s blood. There was simply a tacit understanding about the things you did not talk about if you wanted to be invited to parties. Fandom became an interior endeavor, and in her cowardice, she began to resent the outliers, the ballsy few with their acrid D&D cologne and keen topographical knowledge of Gotham City. But to be a girl meant your bonafides were always questionable.

And if you were a black girl, there was a daisyed hellscape between the unimaginative and the well-meaning, a cognitive dissonance too ingrained to parse, requiring both peacocking and frantic camouflage. It was a series of rooms in which she was unwelcome—musty multi-console gaming rooms at dinky local cons where fedoras turned in unison to appraise the errant antigen, put-upon homunculi offering unsolicited education about the finer details of canon, hoping to show her up as a fraud. The general feeling of having nowhere to relax into her native tongue and release all that uncool, earnest ooze. But when she looked at herself in the mirror in her skimpy, badly sewn cosplay, for the first time in her life, there was no shame. The shame she felt now was reserved for a more current indulgence in make-believe: the successful mimicry of extroversion.

It happened like this: She came to college wanting to be someone else, and via a series of forced club outings, compulsory one-night stands, and soulless extracurriculars, she’d become a shadow. She was in pursuit of what all black girls were supposed to be born with—a jovial, ironclad self-esteem, a sense of rhythm, and a witchy finesse with jojoba and coconut oils.

She was in pursuit of that inalienable right to say whether or not someone was, in fact, down. So she went out and shouted over the music at dull, drunk boys. She socialized with her classmates, who gazed into the middle distance instead of at her face, coming alive only to disparage their parents who dared buy them used cars and ask for help with Microsoft Word. She joined a sorority, the college paper, the student-run literary journal, and, for reasons she did not want to investigate, the college gospel choir. She fell in love with any negging techie who emerged with an axe to grind about the fineries of sub and dub. She travelled to lonely Hyde Park churches and sang wan renditions of “Amazing Grace” in exchange for deep pans of post-service ziti. She checked for missed calls from her father and found none. She mixed with her sorority sisters—a band of leathery tanning fiends whose most distinct characteristic was being proud of being from New Jersey—and learned the right vernacular to pass off her casual bitchiness as truth. She took an editor position at the literary journal, where she met black student #57, her co-editor—an owlish neurotic in green-colored contacts who practiced calligraphy, approached her at a party simply to declare that he preferred Asian women, and who then tried to sleep with her to embarrassing avail.

Over poems about birds, menstruation, and heavy-jowled trees, he apologized about not being able to get an erection. At a mixer with a fraternity, she met black student #73, a rich, deeply fine Black Republican who was himself physically excellent proof of their race having once been bred for fields, but who frequently fawned over the administration of the elder Bush. When they slept together, it was a battery of punishments: the iron heft of his body and smug, brutish use of his mass, and the ebb and flow of sympathy and disdain.

At times he seemed human enough to share that old inside joke of having pulled off the improbable trick of thriving in white space. But then he’d fasten his belt and suggest she chemically straighten her hair. And when she somehow became vice president of her sorority, vetting new girls’ scared renditions of the Greek alphabet like the dictator of some lawless, Mediterranean Sesame Street, she knew she wasn’t in on the joke either.

She was a fraud, loyal to no particular version of herself. So maybe this is why it was easy to march to the registrar and demand—in the unlikely event of her graduation—that her diploma reflect a revision of her hyphenated name. And on the day she received confirmation that she could remove her father’s name, Alexander reappeared at her dorm with carnations and a black eye.

Here, he said, shoving them into her arms. And there was homework and a shower she needed to take but he was already shrugging off his jacket, rolling a j, and licking the edges, and she knew all of her lines. There were things she could do without too much calculation—harmonize, turn a cartwheel on the grass, reach through a wall of smoke and hook herself onto a man. But sometimes it was overwhelming, and every uncool word clamored up her throat, earnest and wet. She was smart enough to press her teeth together. She’d never become wily enough to control the ugly spasms of her face.

Black student #73 liked to use mirrors. He liked to say, look at yourself. And she would look, hoping to find something powerful, the way women held mirrors under their skirts and found in those mouths a crass new vocabulary. But when she looked at the way ecstasy rearranged her face, she only knew that she never, ever wanted to see it again. So it felt like a cruel moment of telepathy when Alexander, with his pretty half sneer, asked her to stop making that face, and also that when she smoked, she was too tight.

“Okay,” she said, dismounting and looking for her clothes.

“Hey, you don’t have to be like that.”

“You always keep your shirt on when we fuck. And it’s weird. I’ve never said anything about it. But it’s weird.”

“Yeah well, you talk about cartoons like they’re real.”

“They’re real to me,” she replied, realizing too late that saying this out loud would only exacerbate her humiliation. Alex, sensitive to this miscalculation, seemed for a moment like he might try to diffuse the situation, but then he turned away and began to collect his things.

“I gave you that Alaskan Thunderfuck at a wild discount,” he said, and the invocation of the central currency between them suddenly did not feel casual. Erin understood that she was meant to feel demeaned, and that was reason enough to direct her criticism where she knew it would hurt.

“You should’ve given it to me for free. Don’t think I don’t notice the discrepancy between what you sell me and what we smoke when you come over. It barely gets me high.” She took a little pleasure in the short circuiting of his face, the silence in the air as he tried to accommodate this impossibility. Then he laughed, which scared her a little, not least because he was still fully erect. He took a deep breath and pulled on his pants, his shoes.

“You know you belong here, at this school. You’re one of them. You don’t think so, but you are.”

After spending so much time fretting about how she was going to tell her manager a believable lie, it was as simple as pulling him aside during the breakfast rush and saying that there’d been a car accident. She was almost insulted by his nonchalance, by the long, irritated sigh as he retrieved his pen and snatched the shift schedule from the wall. When she finished her shift, she threw her apron over her arm, went outside, and felt the sun on her face. It occurred to her that her father actually might be dead. It was odd—in her youth she had obsessed over the mortality of her parents. She called them incessantly when they left the house, bartered earnestly with God for their safe travels to work and the grocery store. To some extent, she still felt this panic about her mother, but about three months after her father left, the fear she kept for him went out like a light.

He was eighteen years older than her mother. When they met, her mother was slim and strung out, and he was an old sailor who’d already buried two wives. They weren’t in love, but then a daughter, then a marriage. She wanted her daughter to have the father that she’d been denied. She wanted her daughter to be able to trust men, to love them without her fists half-drawn. And for a while it worked. In fact, he was closer to his daughter than he was to his wife, so much so that on the day he left, her mother just sighed and said, “I mostly can’t believe he would do this to you.”

The morning of comic-con, Erin received a third urgent email from her academic advisor that she promptly ignored. She relished the opportunity to make a photogenic, labor-intensive breakfast. She washed her hair slowly, put on her face with a steady, serious hand—the slick primer, powder, and kohl. She rolled the fabric of her costume between her fingers and forgave its hot glue and crooked, sagging wings. She smoked a couple of joints, pulled on her wig, boots, and cardboard galactic gun. She boarded a city-bound bus, and when she arrived into the sea of Lycra and make-believe seething at the doors of the convention center, she was sure she was going to faint. It was pure and narcotic, the half-queasy feeling she usually got before a promising date or dreaded family engagement. A man in a Gundam suit hailed her out of the crowd, asked, “What are you?” And she was so happy to be asked that she didn’t notice his penis, hanging flaccid through a chink in his mechanical suit.

“I’m a void witch.” She spread her arms and spun, emboldened by all the theater around her. “From the White Dwarf Chronicles? Second to last boss after you get to through the water chamber. A supermassive black hole gathers mass and density and then it—” when he started to stroke himself, she allowed herself a moment of paralysis, and then simply turned and walked in the other direction. Nothing so ordinary was going to sour her mood.

When they opened the doors, she ran to the comic-book cages. The red carpet was already soiled with mustard, glitter, and unpopular swag-bag toys, all the off-brand blockbuster heroes, meticulously hardwired mechs, and harried, plain-clothes journalists suspended in a state of ecstatic media res. She hung around in the stacks and tracked with her own eyes the transition of superheroes from silly ’60s panties to sleek post-aughts body stockings, the dewey decimal stink of expensive vintage issues thickening her throat. She hit Artist’s Alley with wild delusions of grandeur regarding her personal budget, leapt into makeshift dressing rooms, shimmied out of her cosplay into professionally sewn steampunk petticoats, and left with a handful of mismatched clocks. She watched the professional cosplayers strut between walls of polymer toys. She admired large oils and acrylics that rendered hokey two-dimensional icons with burly realism, the uncanny valley spread out before her like an odd, vaguely sexual dream.

She haggled for stickers and expansive giclée prints, already imagining how she might arrange them on her walls at home. And there were people who really did want to know who she was, some who already knew, mommies and daddies with cat-eared tots, laughing and raising their cameras, unphased by her cleavage and bloodshot eyes. Of course, there was the underarm stench, the claustrophobic cattle drive to the speed dating and gaming rooms. And then there were the panels.

The chance to see all the gods of her fantasy worlds, writers and fine artists who worked crowds like standups, guzzling water between awkward technical gaffes. There were others who were clearly too introverted to be on stage, men and women who were precious and cold, so allergic to eye contact it was hard to imagine how they managed their fame. There were voice and screen actors who moved in and out of character so fluidly that she worried over fractures in the fantasy and closed her eyes against their vocal tricks. Most importantly, among the stars of the con was Erin’s childhood idol, Haru Takahashi.

It was the first time he’d ever appeared at a con. A somewhat reclusive man of forty-five, he was notoriously awkward with fans, rumored to have a thing for dollar-store licorice and old, erotic film. Per his colleagues, he was prone to fainting in his home studio and rupturing his vocal cords for the acrobatic demands of his job, which was to be the voice of TV’s most beloved monkey god.

The Monkey in the Moon was a raucous, intergalactic animated saga that had been on the air for fifteen years, frequently alienating its multi-generational fanbase by ignoring its own rules, casually killing off fan favorites, and going on long, corny digressions about interstellar transit law. But none of that mattered to Erin, who had watched every episode more than three times, who, when newly indoctrinated into the fandom at nine years old, spent afternoons writing crude fan scripts that her cousins dutifully performed for her Fisher-Price tape recorder.

And so it was on this basis that she set out to attend his panel, maneuver her way to the front, and figure out a way to convey silently what she wanted to scream. Only just as she went to find the appropriate line, she checked her phone and found a fourth manic email from her academic advisor—whose subject line read: Get Your Shit Together, Erin!

There was no choice but to read the backlog and confirm what on some level, she already knew. She was failing out. Erin shut herself in the bathroom, ripped off her wig and considered the glitter on the toilet seat. Sweat streamed from the wig cap and into her eyes, and when she jogged back to the panel, her thighs caught on each other. Too late, she realized she’d left her galactic gun on the hand dryer. That she was still high was almost a comfort, a way to rationalize why the news felt italicized, why the floor of the con suddenly felt hostile, fluorescent, and too smelly to bear. It didn’t help matters that her wig had taken to spinning around her head, resisting every attempt she made to straighten it, until she simply gave up and parted it where it chose to sit.

With seconds to spare, she tumbled into the panel room and spilled all of her clocks. Sheepishly, she gathered them into her arms, and marched to the front of the room. She sat in the dark until it was time, fanning herself, looking around at all the mortals, the moist disarray of speedsters, expository villains, and ersatz sidekicks taking video, feeding burritos through their masks. She zeroed in on Haru, noting the way he fiddled with his notes, pushed his long, silver-streaked hair away from his eyes, and then seemed to regret his sudden exposure to the lights. He appeared as solitary as she hoped. The most subdued of all his co-panelists, when he did choose to speak, it was in that careful, golden tenor, his clipped, sarcastic answers splintering the room. It occurred to her that everyone had come for him. And so when it was time, she rushed up and planted herself directly in his line of sight. But when they passed her the microphone, her heart rose into her throat and his face swam before her eyes.

There was a prickly susurrous rising in the dark room, a titter here or there that she couldn’t quite make out over the emergency in her chest. He seemed relaxed as ever, almost disinterested, but there was a slight smile, more wary than pleased. She cleared her throat, looked down at the clock she suddenly realized was cradled against her breast. “So obviously I know you can’t spoil which level of quartz the grand ape mined from the saturnalian mine. But I need you—can you see me? I need you to know that I can’t imagine my life without your voice. The voice of the monkey king. He’s living in fear of the moon and the Luminescent Boar and I’m such a fan, and I just feel really—” She paused, and without warning, her eyes began to run like organic peanut butter, at which point she apologized, handed the microphone to small Batman standing behind her, and promptly rushed out of the room. Outside the convention center, she noticed the man in the Gundam suit—who she only now realized was not attending comic-con, but was a cousin of one of those dubious Times Square Elmos—was still out front. She bought a pretzel just for napkins to use to dry her face.

She looked around and found two Harley Quinns sobbing by the garbage, a Spiderman smoothing out a large piece of cardboard, setting up a tip cup next to a stereo. When she felt her phone buzz, a smiley, eastern European New York tour briefly engulfed her, their eyes turned skyward. Without thinking, she accepted the call. The voice on the other end was unfamiliar. Then it was too familiar. When she’d imagined this moment, she was prepared. She was steely and degreed. Sometimes she imagined she might hang up. But there his voice was now, after a year.

“How is my little girl?” the voice said, and she wanted to laugh, to scream. Because of course it was all so much better in her mind. Of the course the fantasy was in reality as casual as this—a knotted synthetic wig in her fist, a drooping falsie on her cheek, as she summoned a breath and said,“Oh, I’ve never been better.”

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The Illinois & Love, This I Know:

The Illinois

Frank Lloyd Wright’s mile high

skyscraper dream had 528 stories,

and atomic powered elevators.

It makes you think of a caterpillar.

Maybe we are all one caterpillar,

and our apocalypse is a chrysalis?

Love, This I Know:

My face was not my face

until it lost your trace.

Heartbreak is the power

to flower a flower.

Love is summer snow

& words are pajamas:

Fire won’t burn my hand

and miss, kiss, mere air.

Love can no more carry

my heart than a suitcase.

We have passed by

stand-ins & sentries—

There is the ‘one’

& ‘two’ or ‘three’

Never touch like we!

Walk on winter sand

we in we & in we?

(Wait, let me take a breath

& laugh today at death…)

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Two Videos by Carl Knickerbocker

Visual account of an audio visit to a convenience store.

I got Apple TV. Periscope came free. I got a little infatuated with Periscope. Made this short. On separate evenings recorded visual then audio Periscope broadcasts.

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Caught

Your mama drops you off at five o’clock, rolls in with an extra-large suitcase full of clothing for all seasons, a blue balloon nightlight, a patchwork baby blanket, coloring books, picture books, an unopened box of crayons. On her arm dangles another bag with blue toothbrush, blue toothpaste, your special blue cup, the blue multivitamins you take before bed. And at her side, you—a round, far-gazed boy, one hand clutching the fabric of your mama’s jeans, the other gripped around the snout of a stuffed pig in a checkered waistcoat.

“Any problems,” your mama says, “just call.”

“Yes.” In her shadow, we both keep still while she frets and fidgets, takes out a notebook crowded with tightly coiled numbers. She was like this as a little girl too, your mama—my daughter. All fluttering hands and nervous glances. “I’ve made up your old bedroom,” I say. “Logan can sleep there.”

She tears a sheet from the notepad, folds and presses it to my chest. “There’s where you can reach me,” she says. “And that one’s Doreen, his regular sitter. And Mrs. Bogart; she’s got a spare key if there’s anything you need from the house.”

Ink seeps through the page, blackens my thumb and forefinger. “Don’t worry,” I say.

Your mama plucks you off her leg and guides your hand towards mine. She says, “I’ll pick him up Monday morning. Before preschool.”

“Yes,” I say. “Don’t worry.”

For an instant, her face becomes pinched, punctured with tension before she breathes and nods. She kneels, cups the side of your head, and kisses you goodbye.

The tears begin after she drives away. A lost look, a panicked look, and then a wail that sounds like a ship taking its first voyage away from land. Water plunges past the hull, a huge exclamation, an oil-drum symphony between my ears. You pound a tiny fist on the window, twist backward in my arms. So, we go to your room—her old room—and I barricade the door on stiff-jointed knees.

Mama! Mama! Mama!

Shriek and shriek until you’re too tired and I can hold you again. There’s a little wind-up music box on the shelf—it plays “Singin’ in the Rain,” and you like that. Twist the handle round and round, sit sprawled on the old Parisian rug sniffling the last sobs away while I go downstairs to make peanut-butter banana crackers. Your mama used to eat those the way a magpie eats ladybirds.

—

Before I turn off the lights, before I leave the room, you reach across your bed—from beneath the cotton-wool blankets already kicked into a tempest—and say “Balloon.” I plug in the nightlight. Your eyes see further than mine, to something inside the blue Kool-Aid glow.

—

Almost dawn now, no orange on the horizon but at least a paling of the darkness. Stars begin to fade. Air rises off the ground cold and thick, like a glass of milk fresh out of the fridge on a summer afternoon.

And the front door groans open.

I can see you from the window, Logan. I can see you teeter down the front path and onto the deserted road, little feet almost too round to balance on—that stuffed pig under your arm better dressed for the cool morning than you.

I run.

I run and leave the front door wide. Feet naked like yours, over wet grass, past the post box with its tin flag rusted upright. I run fast and hard enough to see just as you dash across the neighbors’ lawn and behind their car.

“Logan!” I yell. And then “Don’t worry. Don’t worry!”

You keep going, leave footprints in the begonias, footprints in the chrysanthemums. They’re shallow impressions, only the size of my palm. At the end of the yard, you squeeze between two loose fence boards, no wider than the stump of a cherry tree. “Logan!” I yell. The stuffed pig lies grinning, plush-and-tumble on the ground.

Run down a back alley, through another yard, and then another. The footprints this time are puppy-dog small, brown markings over a stranger’s driveway. They wobble towards an accidental patch of trees, a scraggly bunch of growth that the men with cement mixers and trucks of rubble forgot to chop down when they built this place forty years ago. Fallen branches murmur at my ankles, but I can see you now. I get closer and you get smaller, smaller—small enough to fit inside one of my winter galoshes.

“Logan!” I yell. Nearby, you laugh—because it’s all a game, cat and mouse, grandmother and grandchild—you laugh and dart between the brambles of a knee-high brown bush. Footprints span the length of my thumbnail. Thousands of inchworms hang from invisible threads, and I thrust them aside like tasseled bed curtains. Now the grass wavers where you weave through it; now it doesn’t because you’ve grown too small for even that. You laugh and laugh and laugh, and I follow that sound, follow it around twisted oak trunks, bowing evergreens, and skinny matchstick saplings. Mayflies scatter like wrong-way raindrops. Rooks chitter and fling themselves at the sky.

“Logan.” I don’t yell this time because laughter fills greenery. Somewhere close, overhead. “Logan.”

Rising light catches the trees in faint silhouette. I look up and there you are, caught in a spider’s web, caught in strands of leftover moonlight, laughing and laughing and laughing and laughing.

—

In my hands, fall asleep again. I carry you back: out of the trees, across the alley, through the fence, over the lawn. You grow bigger as we go, filling one palm and then two, filling the crook of my elbow and then my arms. I ease you into bed, spread blankets smooth.

Tomorrow, when she comes to pick you up, your mother will look head-to-toe at you, at me. She’ll say, “Everything go alright?” And I’ll say “Yes alright. No need to worry.” Maybe you won’t say anything. Maybe you’ll laugh.

Steely spider threads tangle your hair. I pluck them free one-by-one, lay them on the pillow while you sleep until your face is crowned with silver.

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His First Night Home

from the hospital, I heard him cry

and lifted him from his bed

and brought him into ours,

and after his mother had fed him,

I rested him on my chest,

which rose and fell with him

until daylight.

And when I brought him home

from the hospital again,

after the social worker persuaded him

to let her call me, and after he told me

he thought he was ready to quit

using, I was afraid he might

sneak away in the night,

so I had him sleep beside me,

where all night long I heard

his labored breath, felt,

his legs beat against the sheets:

that sparrow, stunned

by the window’s false sky,

trembling in my hands,

catching its breath until

it fluttered and flew away.

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Two Poems on Love-Play

Roles

It was late, & you were

wearing your widow suit,

black of 1870s chic,

loaded with bustle.

I did my best Doc

Holliday—Val’s version, cock-

sure & half-goofy. You

laughed. I laughed. Val

would’ve laughed if he were here

watching me paw at your corset,

pull the strings to tighten it.

Moments like this,

we feel happiest,

field mice exploring

magnificent catacombs

of a dusty closet.

I act out in otherness;

you dress up the same:

not faces of whatever

force invented us,

but what we make

of ourselves

when we’re at play.

Let Me Be Your Dream Dunce

Bright-eyed desperado on a mission for disaster.

Snow-cap climber heading for the peak

of Mt. Oh-no-one-goes-there-ever.

View-taker who topples over the railing of the boat

into choppy waters you barely save me from.

Let me let go of rope, map, & stars—

I’ll walk into danger as a fawn

not fast enough to flee the mountain lion,

tell you philosophies of nothing while we sit

in your dream-Jacuzzi in our clothes.

Let me be clumsy, cuss, rant, & stub my toe

on a jag in the earth,

my forehead once more on the jeweled moon.

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An Introspective Journey

Beast: A Novel
by Paul Kingsnorth
Graywolf, 2017, $16

We only need to look around ourselves and the world to know there are many things wrong with our society: How our comforts have made us lethargic, how our technology only divides us, and how the lack of empathy between different cultures has only deepened in recent years. This is the rabbit-hole that Beast invites us to plunge down, in a beautiful exercise of stream-of-thought and self-reflection. Paul Kingsnorth’s poetic prose takes us into the mind of Edward Buckmaster, who has fled his normal life to live in solitude, high in the English moors. While this is not a new concept, Kingsnorth’s novel is original in its form and offers a tilted perspective that gives the narrative a unique voice.

Beast is the second novel to a trilogy. The first novel, The Wake, published in 2014, was that same year longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, won the Gordon Burn Prize. Both books stand entirely on their own, with no need to read one before the other. The Wake has been praised for its inventive language, as Kingsnorth merged his own form of Old and Modern English to write it. Beast, on the other hand, experiments with sentence structure, and you’ll find, as the narrative progresses, certain rules are either lost or forgotten. It’s notable, at first, then it becomes a part of the book, and then a part of the character.

Edward Buckmaster’s voice is both simple and dynamic in the constant questioning and reasoning between which he traps the reader. He has fled to the moors to find himself, to let nature overtake him, and eventually find enlightenment, as if it were that easy. We find Edward at the beginning of the novel already more than a year into his self-imposed exile, standing in a freezing river and letting the cold water numb his body. “The river sang and kept singing,” and Edward welcomes pain and challenge in the forms of nature and his own fasting. It’s not long before a powerful storm finds him and breaks his body. From this point on the core of the story begins. The sun stops setting, his food runs out, and it’s not long before a creature of some sort begins to stalk him. There are no other characters to be found, except in his memories. Even then, they appear as wisps and phantoms.

While there are only hints as to what Edward leaves behind in his earlier life, we rarely find ourselves caring about them. He is here now, high in the moors, alone with the rawness of nature and the creature. Besieged with hardships, fog, and visions, Edward must push himself forward. The sense of time becomes lost, as well as any firm sense of reality. That’s not to say that Edward is an untrustworthy narrator. Rather, the effeteness of Kingsnorth’s prose wraps the fog around his readers as much as it does Edward. We get tangled in the “hot and muggy and still and the sky was a uniform white across the farmyard and over the top of the silent ash trees” sentences that go on and against each other, through Edward’s head and seemingly out into the moors.

While the strength of Beast lies in Kingsnorth’s unique prose, at times readers accustomed to plainer fare may find it difficult. The 164-page novel ends up feeling a bit longer, as it becomes necessary to put the book down at times to consider Edward’s thoughts or the surrounding circumstances he finds himself in. The prose insists that you digest each sentence properly, lest you miss some hidden meaning. It brings on a fascination at the level of language as opposed to plot and requires the reader to live inside the world of the novel and inside Edward’s head.

The search for meaning in life is as old and cliché as literature itself, but there is very little that is cliché here. The narration moves from one thought to the next in a translucent, stream-of-consciousness manner that conveys Edward’s thoughts as if they were your own, contemplating topics and issues that are very much prevalent in today’s world. Indeed, Kingsnorth’s elsewhere-stated love for nature, ecological advocacy, and warnings about global warming are underlining themes that come to life in his settings as well.

To read Beast is to make a journey of two sorts, as it may be impossible not to consider your own value as Edward considers his. That is the beauty of Beast—it captures that essence of self-doubt that haunts all of us. Though we may or may not find what we are looking for at the end, there is a sense that the answers have been looking for us as well. The third and final novel in this trilogy has been said to take place two thousand years after the story of Beast. One can only wonder what new form Kingsnorth’s imagination will take in that far future.

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The Flood

It was a hard winter. Everything became further away and darker. The roads battered cars; they buckled and heaved and slowed everything down to the point that I stopped wanting to go out. Every time I got in the car, I imagined my own death. I asked myself, Is where I am going worth sliding off the road into the cold water, into a dark tree, into another frozen, creeping vehicle, into the smooth blade of a state plow? So I cut back. I worked from home. I did my grocery shopping once a week, on Sunday afternoons, although by the time I left the store it was already getting dark around the edges of the mountains and I had to follow the lights of my high beams up the valley road. Other things were cut away, visiting friends, going to dinner in the bigger town, seeing a movie, shopping, going to the gym; all these were non-essentials. I imagined that that winter was like the start of the end of days, all of the good things, the extra of civilization falling off.

I saw death everywhere. People were freezing in their homes, the news channel reminded us to check on elderly people, our oil bill asked for a donation to help those who had no money for heat. People got thinner, tougher, and meaner. I didn’t make eye contact in town. I pulled my coat collar up and my hat down over my eyebrows. I kept safe at home.

Joe and I started to lock the doors when we were out. I don’t know if we ever spoke about it, or if it was just something we both felt at the same time. We locked up the poor, little cabin, and all of our poor, broken things inside of it. People were stealing dogs and selling them. People were taking the copper and gold out of the underbellies of cars. They were even carrying off firewood. We watched the long driveway for strange headlights in the dark and looked in the snow for tracks, for footprints, for signs.

The cabin we were renting sat at the base of a cliff covered with tall, straight spruce trees. A swift stream ran between the cliff and the house, always in white water, stumbling over huge boulders. The stream rattled and spilled down through the rocks, collecting in big pools, bottomed with smoothed bedrock or soft sand. Just below the house the stream flattened onto a broad flood plain, mingling with another mountain brook. The two waters came together and raced along, white, towards the Connecticut River.

The cabin was heated by a cast-iron woodstove. There was a backup propane heater in the living room and another in the bathroom downstairs, but we could never figure out how to run them because the instructions were in French and the pilot light would not stay lit—it would flicker blue and then vanish back to air. The stove ate through wood, burning fast and hot. The place had been a summer home and, looking to make money quick, our landlords had done almost nothing to winterize it. There were gaps under the doors and where the windows met the wall. There was a hole in the ceiling above our bed through which wasps spilled in the summer and in the winter the cold would come in and hover over us as we tried to pull the blankets up. Worst of all, the house was built on stilts because the stream flooded often. They had surrounded the stilts with black plastic and fencing but still the cabin sat on air, a freezing pillow of winter that reached up through the floor. The dogs would refuse to get off the couch; the cats would walk the backs of chairs, over lamps, across the windowsills to avoid having to touch it. The stove fought the cold, but the heat wouldn’t stick—it would just slip away so that even as the stovepipe glowed amber the cold sat in the bathrooms and the laundry room and the downstairs bedroom. The cold was more comfortable in that home than the heat.

That winter I lived heavily, wrapped in layers. I wore two pairs of socks and walked the floors in slippers. During the day Joe and I rationed wood. The winter was so long and cold that we were worried that it might not end, and we would be left with no fuel. We’d keep the house right above freezing, so cold that the olive oil became solid in the pantry. I lost all sense of my body. I was never naked except for the brief moments between the shower and my towel. I felt like I gained twenty pounds, but, I don’t know, it could have just been that my body became alien to me, strange, a buried thing.

I stayed inside and watched TV wrapped in a fleece blanket on the couch. I cross-stitched Christmas stockings for Joe and me and for each pet. I went to bed early and slept late, following the long darkness. I walked the dogs with a headlight. The trees rose like bodies, and the shadows behind the trees became monsters and thieves. The winter made us animals. It took away everything nice and human. We were cut back down to size by it; we were bodies that needed calories and warmth. We could have slept for days, like skunks and bears. We stopped dreaming for anything besides this life. We became smaller that winter, and less beautiful. I lost things I never got back from that cold.

The brook between the cabin and the cliffs had been frozen for months. Early in December I could see running water between the icy banks, but then I could only hear it, dark and rough. The ice grew and grew in the cold of those days. It was the only thing that got bigger. It grew like continental plates. It changed color. Sometimes it was clear, others it was white, or gray. When there was enough sun, it was blue. The blue ice looked like a blade—it was the ice of the freezing days, when the sun appeared but had no heat, just light in which to cast the world in shadow.

When I was out in daylight, I walked the dogs along the ice banks. It was so thick that it made no sound to walk upon it. Underneath I could hear the water, rumbling. The dogs were afraid of crossing the ice in the center of the brook, where they could hear the water. The ice made sounds of its own. It groaned. It creaked and snapped, brittle pops and long breaks. It shuddered like a fallen tree settling into the earth. There were other sounds that were harder to describe, hums, wavering tunes like Tibetan chants that sat right between two notes and seemed to be trying to break the world at its weak parts. Sounds rang along it, down the cracks, through the broad flat shelves. Dripping and grinding.

That winter the animals became restless. Fox and deer and coyotes stood in the yard and locked eyes with me through the windows without fear. The cats scratched at all the furniture. On the warmest days, I would try to let them outside, but they refused to step into the deep snow. Instead they tore away the legs of our couch. They peed secretly on the loveseat in the back room. They shredded it too, turning the canvas into threads. The dogs pulled apart my books. They got onto the couch and attacked the cushions until there were no cushions left; they had all been emptied of their stuffing and flipped inside out.

By the time the dogs completely destroyed that couch, it was early spring. The light was a little longer in the morning and the evening. The sun has some force behind it. I could turn my face to it and feel something in the sky. There was a day of rain, cold, steady rain that beat the snow down. That night we dragged the couch and the loveseat outside to the backyard, tired of living with those tattered things, tired of flat pillows and torn fabric. We had to pour gasoline on them to start the fire. We waited until it was dark. The gas burst and then snaked inside the forms of the furniture, under the skirts and up the backs, twisting along the wood inside it, slow at first then smoking. Smoking horrible thick black smoke that joined the dark sky. It burnt up the smell of that winter, the animals’ fur and our skin cells, our hair.

Joe and I stood back and watched it. The light from the house stretched out to meet us like an apology. We didn’t touch, we gave each other space like the one, or the both of us might burst into flame too. The snow melted out to our feet. The flames came through from the inside of the furniture, wearing the fabric thin and then bursting out hungrily into the air. We watched it in silence. The fire ate up everything and then, gnawing on the bones, the wood, the springs, the bolts, shuddering and collapsing, like skeletons in a mass grave, all the parts mixed up. We kicked the pieces that fell out towards us back into the fire. We watched the sparks rise into the black smoke pillar, following the raindrops back up. Shivering wet through all our coats and boots and hats, we walked back up the hill to the bright house. The fire lay in coals behind us, gnawing on the hardest bits.

The ceremony of it all stayed heavy between us. That winter had been hard. Joe had picked up smoking again, standing on the porch just an arm’s length from the door as if it might be warmer near the house. When he had quit, I thought we might be moving somewhere good together. With each night he shuffled in the cold, sucking on those menthols, I didn’t know, maybe we weren’t going anywhere at all because I was slipping too. I started seeing things at the edge of light, in the shadows. My fear of driving at night was a real fear. I saw things, my death, the death of the dogs, of my sisters, huge dark primal monsters made of the hills and spruce and rock. I was scared of little things, headlights in the night. I had to understand every sound I heard, place it, or I rocked myself to sleep, trying to rationalize my terror. The ritual of burning the furniture felt like our first attempt at ridding ourselves of these things, casting the devil out. The house was emptied. We sat at the dining table, looking at where the couch used to be. It reminded me of when we had first moved in, all the blank spaces and how tender we had been with each other.

In the morning, the fire was still smoking. I took the dogs down to look at it, the bent nails and twisted springs, the feet and rollers and joints of metal all blackened. I kicked some half-burned pieces into the coals. The snow was melted, and the grass was brown around the fire pit. The morning was warm; there were invisible walls of heat in the woods and along the driveway. The sun was rising, laying a thick haze over the cold water. It was the sort of day when you are excited for no reason. I went out to lunch; I didn’t eat what I had packed for myself. I bought a $20 bottle of wine for dinner.

Coming home, the ice along the road was still solid. I could hear the water under it from the car, running, running. At the cabin, the ice was still solid on the brook, but the water was so loud, a contained scream down the valley. The rain had loosened the sand on the hill, and snowmelt ran off it, picking up big stones and dropping them on the ice like cannon balls. The stones bounced off the ice, bounced into a tree, rattled down with the water, or punched their way through. The water ran like a trapped thing. I couldn’t hear myself think for the noise. The dogs were spooked when I took them out—the rocks had been crashing all afternoon, the water screaming, they had spent the day looking out the windows, wondering what was happening, wondering if the world were coming to an end.

The rain came again as the night settled, warm and dark in the valley. Joe and I talked about floods. Two years ago, a tropical storm had burst through these mountain streams and cut off towns for days. It took weeks to get past mudslides, washed out bridges, roads swept away. The brook we lived on had flooded; the water had risen under the house and run through the driveway. Huge rocks had bowled down the hill, knocking over trees in the front yard. Gravel and riverbed were strewn through the woods. The driveway disappeared. A big section of the hill had fallen into the river. It remained a crescent of naked sand and rock where a few trees hung. It was an ugly slash on the hillside right across from the porch; we had looked at it all summer. We also drove past a safe and a refrigerator that the flood had swept up into the trees along the driveway, mixed with river bottom and debris. The people who had been living there when it happened had been stranded; the water pushed their cars up against the pines. They had walked out over the field to the higher, paved road when it was safe to leave the house.

We talked about the cuts on the trees along the river that had been made by the flood, how high the water had been, how strong, that it would use stone and wood to cut through things like trees, riverbank, to cut away forest. All the time the noises outside got bigger. The rocks were breaking open trees on the slopes, popping, crashing, and punching through the thick ice and the hiss, the scream of the water. The dogs were looking around in terror at the noises.

We lay upstairs and listened to the ringing, crunching, breaking up. It was like a storm but not from above. It surrounded us. At some point, deep in the night, there was a strange, big sound that woke me from sleep. The dogs were sitting at the window; the puppy’s head was cocked to the side. I was too afraid to go to the window and see what they were seeing. The noise finally settled, and the night lay broad and uninterrupted after that. Sleep flattened my fear.

At dawn, we could see that the ice had broken up in the night. It was piled in tall cairns in the front yard and it pushed against the trees along the driveway. The water ran—open, seething, twisted gray and white water—so loud as to need to be yelled over. It hissed and boiled like static. With the dogs I walked around the piles of ice, some pieces a foot thick and stacked in piles six or seven feet tall. These heaps bordered the river; I had to climb to look down into the flood. Some of the ice was cut into bricks, and other pieces had been moved in huge, flat sheets, like countertops, and plowed through the yard to the distant pines. Our fire pit had been washed clean, erased; only the grass kept its char. I found pieces of the couch springs in the driveway and charcoal that had been pushed hundreds of feet away by the water.

Sometime in the night, the water had jumped out of its banks and knocked the ice back into the trees. The stream had used our driveway as a riverbed until it found its way back to the low ground by our mailbox. For some time in the night, we lived above a huge, rolling lake of ice and snowmelt, a flood, flashing through the land around us.

I found a brook trout resting on top of a stack of ice pieces like it had been placed there carefully. I took a picture of it with my phone. This beautiful, bright fish, recently dead and still colorful, six or seven inches long, ended up on top of the ice which had been its ceiling for months. I thought of its strange death, the fear of the flood, the shattering of the ice, the change of its worlds, its gasping for air in the cold night under the dark sky, raised up like an offering to the low clouds. It wasn’t transformation, the slow dawn I hoped for. The thought of the flood roaming our yard in the night scared me more than the endless cold of winter. I imagined water running under our home, under our bed, breaking through the trees, the flood erasing our coals, as if nothing we did mattered and no one would remember.

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The Whole Speaks

An experimental documentary about a modern-day blacksmith and wordsmith, Nelms Creekmur. A text excerpt from his novel, NERBO (from the Italian meaning vigor) provides the backbone for the placement of the moving images, which were shot in his workshop in Atlanta.

Video by Caroline Rumley

Text by Nelms Creekmur

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Inventory of a Black Girl & Gourmet Ars Poetica

Inventory of a Black Girl

Model Made: April 27, 1992

Quantity	Item	Details	Value in USD
2	Lungs full of broken glass	When I cough little bits come loose And scrape against my teeth I have learned to bleed quietly	0
27	Bones (in right hand)	Formed from statues and statistics I vote on which ones to break	0
4	Failed deaths	Each more urgent than the last	0
1	Mouth full of matches	Only sulfur passes through these lips Only fire is respected I am used to swallowed ash And burned tongue	0
2	Stolen songs	The first, when I was born The next, I haven’t been told	0
0	Deeds done right (in the world’s eyes)	_____________	Not Applicable

Gourmet Ars Poetica

My poems taste terrible, too many chewed up

Metaphors and overcooked analogies.

They need more salt, less narcissism.

More technicality, like practicing to how perfectly

Poach an egg, or be consistent with verb tenses.

I need a bigger pot with a sturdy lid

To contain this wild free verse.

Maybe throw it live in boiling water,

Like lobster.

Garnish it with pretty diction,

Say it’s modeled after the classics.

One day I’ll be the Gordon Ramsay of the page

Dragging syntax from hell into my notebook.

I’ll subvert entire stanzas into submission,

They’ll say: “Yes, poet” and “No, poet”

And “That’s not the way I’ve been taught, poet.”

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Poems of Water

Shark Valley

We ride through the sawgrass, the only humans for miles,

as evening glistens in the shallow water,

and thousands of white birds

and gray birds

and black birds
land in the mangroves

to roost for the night.

We talk and stay silent at once as we ride

and imagine wading into the grass

through knee-deep water
until we were far enough

that everyone we’d ever known, everyone we’d loved
had forgotten us. And if we sat down in the water

until our clothes fell away, and we sang

to each other like the breezes across the tall grass,

going nowhere, and the minnows nibbled our bodies

so gently it felt like a new kind of love,

what could we say to the shadows waiting for us,

arms crossed and scowling, as though they owned our darkness?

Love Poem

The names we’ve never spoken, that define us to ourselves

like the rhythm of a river caught inside a stone

smoothed by that river, as it falls toward the sea.

In some other life, I wove grasses and lay down.

In some other life I made a nest, and slept

dreaming like a river, as it slides toward the sea.

How many years did we search to find our lives?

How many years do we have before we leave?

The singing of a river as it falls toward the sea

is a mind without thoughts, pure being, like the breeze

that wakes in your attic, or underneath your bed

and stirs up the dust, while you’re thinking of the sea

and hugging your wife, who’s dreaming in a language

that doesn’t have words yet, and gleams in her eyes

when she wakes in your arms, smelling faintly of the sea

and sunlight in the breeze as it moves through the bedroom

then back out the window, like life itself must leave

the body that held it, or like a wave far out at sea . . .

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The Anachronist

The Anachronist is an interactive narrative set in the year 1596 in which a woman named Anna is set to be burned at the stake. What will be her fate? Your choices will help decide. It is republished with permission by the author from http://peterlevine.ws/anachronist/

View The Anachronist

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Two Poems of the Living Past

Anatomy

Today I eat lunch with the anatomy skeleton

hanging wired together in the art room.

We shake hands. I want to kiss her,

because the bones are real,

and maybe she would bloom out of her decay,

cicada-like and ancient.

A quick, perhaps forgivable glance at the pelvis

confirms, yes, it is a she, and I name her Charlotte

because I like the ring of it.

Leave her body to science?

No, never to science. But to art, maybe.

What color were her eyes, I wonder,

lurking like embers in a heap of bones?

So old, at least now she presides here,

mutely telling the charcoal-drenched artist,

This is all you are, so look.

And if I sit here often enough, insisting on Charlotte,

maybe the name will rattle something awake

in that bone cocoon, knit muscle and skin over that blank,

and she will blink in slow, lush approval.

Rain in Glastonbury

The abbey’s ruined arches jut from the ground

like giant ribs. From beneath them,

this fine mist seems just the thing

for atmosphere, camera perfect and on cue.

It mutes every sound—the tread of our rubber boots,

the tour guide’s practiced tones.

And the bronze plaque marking King Arthur’s grave,

where he is not buried,

stands quietly matter-of-fact in its lie.

We snap pictures. Sure,

with the mist, this could be Avalon.

It isn’t. Maybe that’s why somebody

tore down the abbey years ago and used the stone

to build that big, faceless house on the hill.

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Interview: Yrsa Daley-Ward

Yrsa Daley-Ward was born to immigrant parents (Jamaican and Nigerian) in England, then lived in South Africa for several years as she pursued a career in modeling. It was in South Africa that she encountered the slam and spoken-word poetry community and began writing. She has now published three books—a collection of short stories, On Snakes and Other Stories (2013); a collection of poems, Bone (2014; 2017); and, most recently a memoir, The Terrible (2018). Daley-Ward considers herself an activist for feminist, LGBTQ+, and mental health issues, but expressed the hope that her writing is for everyone.

Lisa Roney for The Florida Review:

It’s rare to find a fashion model who becomes a poet. I read that you had come across a slam poetry event, a spoken-word poetry event when you lived in South Africa. I thought that was a wonderful story. Did that inspire your frankness? It’s interesting to think about you as this very independent person who speaks about the fashion industry in this very honest way and yet still participates in the fashion industry. I just wonder how you combine these two worlds. Is it the sort of situation where you feel a little estranged from the fashion world? Do you have good friends that are thrilled that you are also writing? How do you combine these two cultures—one of which seems to be based on a certain kind of objectification of women, and yet your poetry is very strong and powerful and feminist and anti-objectification? How do you combine them?

Yrsa Daley-Ward:

I think it’s really important to remember—and that’s, I think, the beauty of doing lots of things that are seemingly contradictory—that we’re all multi-faceted human beings. There are models who write. There are people who are seen controversial and wild to our brilliant parents. There are teachers who are engaged in nefarious activities. We’re all like a composite of so many things, and to be in your fullness is really important. I think too much we’re defined by what we do [for a living] or what we look like, even like the gender binary, being super feminine or masculine, so to speak. I love to embrace all aspects of myself. I think that’s super important.

TFR:

I think a lot about the spotlight and how the spotlight is different for a model versus an author. Could you comment about how the spotlight is different?

Daley-Ward:

It is, and it really shouldn’t be, but it is! It’s sort of this weird Venn diagram that’s happening. I enjoy both because in both there’s an aspect of you and performance and rawness. As much as people don’t appreciate it, modeling is an art form like writing. I do think it is.

TFR:

I’m sure it is.

I’m just thinking about the spotlight. I think a lot of that performative act. Do you think it’s easier for you to perform as a writer because you have the modelling career?

Daley-Ward:

No.

TFR:

It’s a different kind of performance.

Daley-Ward:

It’s completely different.

TFR:

That’s what I was fascinated about. For some reason, I think it had to do with seeing those photographs of you, especially the ones that were with the Guardian article and they were extremely beautiful, but they were also severe and remote, distant. I felt a great deal of distance from you, so I was like, “I wonder what it’s like to be photographed in that context.” I’m sure you are performing that for the camera, yet there is something else that comes across in these poems that’s so powerful and human and down to earth. You had described that first spoken-word event where you read your poem and people applauded for you and loved it—you felt that close human connection. I was just interested in how those two things are different or similar if they tap into each other at all.

Daley-Ward:

First of all, that article was really odd because what I said was taken out of context in nearly every line, and I completely didn’t recognize myself in that or in the photos. If you look at any other photo, even in modelling, I just don’t look like that. It was strange. I think most photos capture my essence as it is, but I do think there’s a different spotlight. In modelling, I guess you’d be prepared for what’s happening, whereas you roll up to a writing event and then, all of a sudden, people are taking photographs and it’s just you. But both of them are just different aspects of the same thing. I love balance; I love being able to do the switch between the two. I write every day. I actually do a lot more writing than modelling at the moment, but I really enjoy both elements. I think they can bleed into each other. I think you can show humanity and softness, maybe not in the Guardian article [laughter], but humanity and softness in modelling in the same way.

TFR:

I am fascinated by how you developed such a strong sense of self coming out of the religious background that you describe in some of the poems, and in other interviews as well. It’s a very strict, very severe kind of upbringing that you’ve described. I guess the stereotype, especially of women, who come out of that kind of background is that they are very self-sacrificing and they’re very self-abnegating. They don’t have a lot of confidence, and yet you do. You exude strength. Where did that spark start for you that, “I’m me and I’m these complicated things and I’m going to be powerful”?

Daley-Ward:

I was lucky enough to have been introduced to literature and language at a really young age by a mom who was a single parent, a Jamaican immigrant, so the need for education and everything like that was impressed on me from an early age. So, I got this gift of opening books and learning about deep and complicated subjects and people who didn’t always say what they meant, people who were doing all kinds of things. I read everything when I was young. I read the Bible, I read the Kama Sutra, both of them very intently. There’s always been dichotomy and contradictions, but I think that allowed me to feel rich. And conflicted—yes—but conflict is very human, isn’t it?

The gift of religion helps you understand people because you go to church or wherever it is that you worship, and you see the way people struggle with religion and what they say versus what they do and everybody trying to chase this ideal. Of course, religion has its very difficult aspects, but it’s also really beautiful. Learning to appreciate and see the joy in a lot of different things is something that such a strict religion did for me because as much as I was nervous and I felt like I was not going to heaven, I also loved the ceremony of it and the fellowship of it as well. There are lots of different parts to it.

TFR:

How would you describe your own religious belief? I felt like Bone in a way moves back in time. I was really touched by getting to the poems in the latter part of the book where they seem to be very kind to your grandparents and your mother. I had formed this question early on which was like, What is your relationship with your grandparents now? What is your relationship with that? You’ve talked about it already a little bit, about the community that you found in the church and the beauty of the ritual and such. Maybe that’s a very personal question, but I’m really interested in that same issue that you brought up, which is about watching people in various religious traditions struggle with what they mean in their own lives. We have a lot of that going on in the U.S. public life right now.

Daley-Ward:

Oh, goodness! Yes, so much.

TFR:

If it’s not too personal a question, how do you relate to the religious world that you came from?

Daley-Ward:

I’m not a Seventh-day Adventist, which is the religion I was brought up in. It’s ever-changing. I’m attempting to fathom what that is. What do I believe still? There were a lot of things that were heavily ingrained, and they never really worked themselves out. Even though I live this life that is apparently the opposite of all of that, there are things in me that aren’t going to come out. I do catch myself on any given day wondering what the truth is. Of course, nobody knows for sure. We live on faith. Especially, Christians live on faith. I am constantly grappling with how I feel about religion and the idea of God versus my idea of the universe. I am spiritual, but religious, no.

TFR:

I think that’s really what I sensed in this book, and it comes across really well. Your poem “Poetry,” from Bone, but which you read in an online video, reminded me a lot of Tess Gallagher’s short essay, “Ode to My Father.” Do you know that essay?

Daley-Ward:

No, but I’m going to read it.

TFR:

I brought it to you.

Daley-Ward:

Oh, my God! Thank you!

TFR:

She has this wonderful line. She says, “If terror and fear are necessary to the psychic stamina of a poet, I had them in steady doses just as inevitably as I had the rain.” This is an essay and poem about her parents arguing and her father beating her and how she gradually came to forgive him. When I read your poem “Poetry,” I was very much reminded of that.

Daley-Ward:

I see the link.

TFR:

I wanted to ask what you see as the connection between difficulties in life and poetry.

Daley-Ward:

There is nothing that you can’t work up into art. Whether it’s poetry or whether you’re painting or making a piece of theater or anything, what happens to you is going to strengthen what you are doing. The thing I think is so beautiful about poetry is how we can succinctly reach into our hearts and the hearts of other people because we are all having the same experiences on this planet. These experiences transcend, for the most part, class, race, gender, all those things. I think it’s important to have those moments and—I wouldn’t say to document them or identify with them—but definitely reach out. If a poem can make somebody feel somewhat less isolated or that there is somebody else who understands what they are feeling or just put a voice to how they’re feeling, then the poem’s done its job or the piece of art has done its job. Of course, difficulty is gold.

TFR:

It’s such an interesting thing about writing. It’s kind of a joke that we tend to say. Something terrible happens to you, and you’re like, “Oh, well, it’s material.”

Daley-Ward:

Yeah!

TFR:

I think it’s an odd juxtaposition for writers where sometimes they end up seeking it out.

Daley-Ward:

Yeah—that’s dangerous!

TFR:

Being destructive in their own lives in order to have material. Sometimes that works out and sometimes it doesn’t work out.

Daley-Ward:

I guess too much of that could block you. Those difficulties are going to come up. You don’t need to make them happen. They’re part of life.

TFR:

Why do you think it’s so important for poetry to reach beyond the “elite,” to reach ordinary people, and what do you think that poetry can do to help ordinary people?

Daley-Ward:

We’re all ordinary. We all have feelings. Literature is for everyone, not a select group of people. That’s ludicrous! What can it do for ordinary people? It gives them voice, it helps people feel less alone, it brings us together and we all desperately need to be brought together because we’re so divided. We’re all connected in this world. It feels crazy to me. Poetry acts as a bridge. It brings us closer together, it helps us not feel so alone, it gives an outlook to something that’s inside. If I was not writing, God knows what mental state I would be in.

TFR:

Your poems are very, very, very personal, but they also feel to me that they have a social, political edge to them. They have implications beyond the self. I think for writers in particular, the current social state that we’re living through in this world can feel increasingly hostile. How we might work, all of us, writers, to bring people to poetry and to literature where I feel that there is this more complex understanding of other human beings?

Daley-Ward:

I think there are so many things. This is actually so exciting because this is starting to happen online—and I know people have a lot of mixed feelings about this—but even the poetry, almost a whole canon already, that has appeared on Instagram has made lots of young people, people who would never pick up a poetry book for fear that it might be boring, which a lot of poetry is . . .

TFR:

Sometimes it is!

Daley-Ward:

Things like that—poetry in dance, in films, poetry with music, going to prisons, teaching it in schools. Impromptu poetry performances on the street would bring so many people to it because they realize, “Oh, it’s not this closed shop. It’s just people talking about their feelings.” If more people knew that and didn’t think that it was this thing that is closed. Honestly, there is just so much poetry that I don’t understand. I know it’s so clever, but I don’t think I’m a strong enough reader of poetry yet. I buy poetry books by the bucket-load, but I’m still learning how to read it and how to access that super academic poetry. I love everything, but it’s important for that not to be the only thing.

TFR:

I agree. That’s one reason why I was so drawn to your book.

Daley-Ward:

Yes.

TFR:

Partly, it was that contrast with some of other poets. Just the contrast is a wonderful thing. We can have both of these things. We can have the world where someone is paying attention to every single syllable and creating some kind of sonnet or some kind of formal poem and yet, we can also have poetry that’s raw and down to earth.

I’m also really looking forward to your memoir [The Terrible]. I love that you said, “It will tell everything.”

Daley-Ward:

It pretty much does.

TFR:

What do you think is the relationship between truth-telling as an important kind of upstanding thing to do and rebellion for shock’s sake? What’s the relationship between those two things? How do you think about truth-telling?

Daley-Ward:

I think it’s a powerful tool in a world where there is not a lot of it, unfortunately. I never intended to write a memoir or tell anybody anything about myself, ever, but it’s just the way in which this has come to me. There were doses of fear that come along with that. When I started to examine what the reason for this was, the most important thing that came out of nowhere—and which gives me a reason to be here and sit down and be able to do all this, without turning me into a nervous wreck—is just the fact that I think to be here is to be in service to the world, in service for people for whom these experiences are completely normal. When I speak about marginalized communities, it’s not only people of color, queer people, sex workers, people who’ve been involved in what we call criminal activity. I’m a deeply private person, but something about making this kind of work is stronger. I was talking to my friend today on the phone and we were just talking. I get some lines sometimes when I’m just chatting and I said to her, “My destiny is louder than my comfort.” I was like, “Oh! I’m going to Tweet that!” It really is at this point. It’s become more important to do that.

TFR:

It’s gone beyond yourself and your expression. You feel a responsibility to other people.

Daley-Ward:

I do! Otherwise, how are we going to do this? Our sex workers are going to think that they can’t write the next bestseller. Children of color who live on council estates or in the hoods are going to think they can’t write a Pulitzer prize.

TFR:

Especially now, because we do seem to be in a time of shrinking opportunity where the rich get richer and everybody else is left behind. It’s scary sometimes, especially in terms of education. I understand that completely, that sense of responsibility for bringing that forward.

Could you comment on Instagram and other social media as a method of artistic expression? Do you see social media as the future of poetry and other literary forms? What are the limitations of that?

Daley-Ward:

Not completely the future, because where there is progress and wonderful work on Instagram, one of the issues with things happening on mass media is that, sometimes, it might lose its power. That’s a small price to pay because it’s making literature current. Literature has always been current, but now to reach everybody, because almost everyone has a smartphone. As much as people who have an attitude about this won’t like this, I think it’s wonderful because if you were never interested in poetry, now, these days, people will be engaging with poetry whether they know it or not, which I think is wonderful, especially for young people, the next generation.

TFR:

What’s next for you?

Daley-Ward:

Every day I ask myself that. It’s The Terrible next. I just finished my final edit of that which has been a really interesting process. I’ve just relocated to New York. I love to meet people and I love to read poetry, and I hope to do so much more of it live. Sometimes I do it with musicians. Just to be doing what I love and to create more work constantly. I hold myself accountable in that way—actually getting stuff done. So, writing and really documenting this time because it feels really special. It’s very important to me.

TFR:

Any last words of wisdom?

Daley-Ward:

I don’t know that I’m wise.

TFR:

Or last words of spirit?

Daley-Ward:

I would say that in this world, it’s more important than ever before for people to feel empowered to tell their stories because their stories are very valid, and if you are worried whether it’s strong enough or good enough or whether it’s compelling enough, always know that the thing that is the most raw and honest will be compelling to other people because we are all connected. If you have a story that you want to write, tell your story. We really do want to hear it.

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Puncture

Melissa’s mother was the first to spot Sonya in the ICU. She looked at Sonya like everyone back in Largo did, bouncing around her forehead and cheeks, connecting constellations instead of meeting her eyes. The older woman was more lined, fatter—a grandmother, for now—but still recognizable, standing guard outside the room. A whole room reserved for a baby the size of two cupped palms. Sonya remembered reading somewhere that they couldn’t rush new mothers out of the hospital, were legally required to let them stay, even for the stillborn.

Sonya’s skirt set stood out against the scrubs and denim-clad VA dwellers in the way she had always wanted to, but she felt garish amongst the multitude of reflective surfaces magnifying her face’s blistering peaks and craters. She tucked her pink nails into her palms.

“Sonya. I don’t know if you should have come,” Melissa’s mother said. “This is for family.”

Sonya privately agreed. She averted her eyes. There was a man in the hallway repeatedly ramming his wheelchair into the wall, humming to the tune of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

“I’m sorry.” Sonya shoved the terrible stuffed dog she had picked up for the baby into Melissa’s mother’s arms, wincing at its pinkness. “I’ll go.”

“Don’t be sorry,” a voice—sounding like sixteen, picking at garden salad in the lunchroom—said behind her as she turned to go, and boom, Sonya was back in high school. “You’re her Aunt Sonya. You should be here.”

—

Sonya heard the bad news about Melissa’s baby from her old high school’s secretary over a bin of Japanese sweet potatoes. The Whole Foods was new and out of place in Largo, both in budget and stature. Its skeleton loomed, folding over the Chicken Shack and DQ like some sort of brutalist God. She thought it would be safe to stop in, that no one she could have known from her childhood would be interested in green juices. She was wrong.

“Oh, honey, you’re home!”

The local high-school secretary, a bird-like woman with hair cut severely by the chin, dropped a pack of spiralized zucchini and pulled Sonya into an embrace. In the fluorescence of the vegetable section, her skin was cling wrap.

“I should have known,” she sniffed into Sonya’s collarbones. “You were always such a good friend to Melissa.”

Melissa was one of the neighborhood kids. Sonya had gone to school with her, grown up crawling under their desks during lockdown drills and pinning yellow ribbons to their spirit shirts. Melissa used to have two dogs and a brother in Iraq. Sonya was not in town to see Melissa. She hadn’t seen or spoken to Melissa for years.

Sonya was in town because her editor had sent her to do a piece on the opioid epidemic. Readers love a good tragedy, The Cincinnati Inquirer was rumored for a Pulitzer for its heroin article, and rural Florida provided a double whammy.

“Have you visited yet?” The secretary’s eyes were now leaking, and she attempted to wipe her dripping nose with her sleeve.

“No,” Sonya said, honestly. “I actually haven’t seen Melissa in . . .”

These encounters were always awful. She hated seeing people from home, hated the three-hour JetBlue flight, the drive to Largo in a rental car. Hated each cluster of mobile homes she passed, the lurch of pity upon seeing their dreadful names. Paradise Cove and Palm Valley and Dolphin’s Wave. The backs of the signs adorned with crude depictions of genitals and pentagrams and the number 666. The kids she grew up with: now strung-out cashiers and mothers and dealers- how she would have to fix her face so as to not to wear her pity.

She rubbed at her eyes. The secretary seemed to take this as an expression of grief, and reached out to touch her, managing to snag her silk blouse.

“I know, honey. It’s just so terrible. For it to happen to your best friend.”

Sonya had no idea what the woman was referring to, but she agreed. She called her mother while waiting in line with a pack of organic blueberries.

“Ma,” she asked, in place of a greeting. “What’s wrong with Melissa?”

—

Motherhood had softened Melissa’s already round figure, made her ruddier. She was wearing an XXL Tampa Bay Buccaneers shirt from their 2002 Superbowl win. Somewhere, Sonya had a matching shirt. It went down to Melissa’s knees, swallowing her baby weight.

“You’re her Aunt Sonya,” Melissa repeated, her voice very full. “We want you here.”

Sonya had no brothers or sisters. She knew she wasn’t an aunt now, would never be one—she was just a girl who had no one else to sit with in high school— so instead of speaking, she stepped into Melissa’s arms.

Over her shoulder, Sonya saw it, and tried not to scream.

Under an assortment of tubes and blankets, partially shielded by a monitor and surrounded by well-wishers who looked carefully at the floor, was a red and purple smear. A tube, running under the slits where nostrils go, was the only indication that it was breathing.

A man quickly blocked it from her view. She knew without looking at her hand that she had drawn blood.

“This her?” he asked.

Melissa released her.

“Sonya, Craig. My husband.”

Sonya once did a story on self-flagellation, reporting on a radical church that encouraged sanctioned beatings in preparation for adult baptisms. She had thought the practice to be barbaric—perverted even—the shivery way the pastor talked of pain, the way it overtook his face.

Craig, quite simply, looked mad. He looked like the radical Christians, had the jumpy sort of depravity in his eyes that made cops slow down at traffic stops.

“I’ve heard a lot about you. Glad you could come by to see Jay.”

Jay, Sonya realized, was the swaddled lump.

Sonya had no doubt that Craig didn’t want her there, or any of them. Craig wanted to be taking pictures of a pink lump of blankets for his terrible Facebook page. Craig wanted to take his weapon from base and execute them all into an open ditch. Craig wanted to be in a two-bedroom, reheating a Lean Cuisine he had let go cold while enraptured by the sight of his poor, scarred baby inhaling into his wife’s breasts.

—

Melissa wasn’t Sonya’s best friend. Melissa was pale, with a quick smile and cowhide hair that she got cut, short and boyish, at Fantastic Sam’s. She sat with her doughy legs spread and was always eager to show her overlapping teeth. In high school this outweighed her fantastic empathy, so no one spoke to her much.

No one spoke to Sonya either, because of her acne: rippling under her dark skin, cystic and mean. A teacher told her once in Geometry class, Have you tried putting toothpaste on it? in front of everyone, and only Melissa hadn’t laughed.

“That was wrong of her,” she had told Sonya seriously, after class.

“She’s a bitch. I can’t wait to get out of this shithole state.”

“She did something wrong.” The repetition sounded solemn, like a prayer.

Melissa had a strict sense of justice ingrained in her. She wouldn’t let Sonya copy her math homework and couldn’t wait to join the Navy. That’s what her family did.

“I want to be a Marine,” Melissa would smartly tell any adult who enquired.

“Better than selling Mitsubishis,” Sonya said, unsupportive. “Or meth.” These were the career prospects of many of their companions.

“Bad market for foreign cars,” Melissa mused, missing the point in her round-faced, agreeable way.

Melissa was soft while Sonya was angled, forgiving while Sonya taped a slice of deli ham in the locker of a boy who called her pizza face. The only thing they had in common was a love for rap. Melissa, sweet, pasty Melissa could drop bars. She had a collection of CDs living in the cab of her truck. Eminem and Dr. Dre and Wu Tang Clan and Jay-Z. They were a strict Pac family, didn’t own any Biggie. She knew every word on the Blueprint, could rap until the CD ejected. Sonya remembered that was the first time she admired Melissa for anything. Melissa kept them all in her truck’s glove box, along with her dad’s army knife, a birthday gift. For protection against perverts and coyotes, Melissa said seriously.

Their geometry teacher suffered from eight slashed tires that year, sixteen perfect puncture marks.

Melissa enlisted shortly after high school, and Sonya applied to Mizzou. There wasn’t really a need for each other, because Melissa had a new family and Sonya had an advice column, but every so often there would be a text or Facebook message, left to stagnate. A few years later, Sonya got a wedding announcement and a pregnancy announcement in the same stack of forwarded mail. That was just what you did in Largo.

Sonya couldn’t remember Melissa’s husband’s face, but knew he was also military. He had added Sonya on Facebook, where he inundated her timeline with racially-tinged articles from websites like “Truth for America,” all with headlines insisting that she should watch the liberal congressman get roasted by a ten-year-old boy-scout.

After the election, she blocked him, which was why she missed the Go Fund Me for their baby, and the message asking for her prayers.

—

“You should go pay your respects,” her mother had said, when Sonya returned with blueberries and unfounded guilt. “You’d be a comfort.”

Sonya’s mother belonged to the Advice Stitched on Pillows School of Thought. She wore her hair natural and made a big show of disapproving of Sonya’s silk press, reminded her how her oily hair would antagonize her skin. Wore her Walmart Greeter vest, McFlurry in one hand, always eager to spout the contents of a greeting card. She had loved earnest, ugly Melissa.

“I don’t know her anymore, Ma.”

“But she knows you, honey.”

“That doesn’t even make sense!”

Sonya scratched a scab. When she wasn’t writing or smoking, she was usually picking, collecting skin under her fingernails. Her mother would stare at the spots while she spoke to Sonya, would dart straight to her hands. Once, long ago, she had rubbed cayenne powder on them, in an attempt to stop Sonya from picking. It had sent her to the emergency room.

Her old bedroom was the front room of the trailer. It was originally a screened-in porch, but they had put up Plexiglas to mimic windows. You could hear coyotes at night.

She found her old cigar box, her hidey-hole, and smoked two ancient joints. Blew the smoke in the face of her mother’s terrier. Sonya refused to call it, to take it out, so that she wouldn’t have to say the name. She watched as the dog keeled over, tongue lolling, uncomfortably high.

The dog was called John, after Sonya’s father, who had left for another woman when Sonya was ten. Sonya’s mother, unfazed, went to the shelter, picked up the runt, named it after her ex-husband. Spent most of her days writing rambling letters to local judges and other semi-elected officials, demanding her husband pay his alimony.

Largo’s streets were laid out like an outstretched hand, mid-grasp. Sonya’s house rested on the tip of the pointer. The VA hospital sat on the thumb; to reach the drugstore you had to head toward the palm. She drove there, still baked, and found herself in the Hallmark aisle staring at the row of stuffed animals beseechingly, as if asking one to volunteer. She settled on the one with an unbearable face: a pink dog with cross eyes, one sewn lopsided, and drove to the hospital with it in her passenger seat, looking like a pitiful co-pilot.

—

Melissa spent the afternoon pointedly not looking at the mess of tubes, ignoring the padding of family members and stuffed animals, preferring to stare curiously at Sonya, as if she were the spectacle.

“How are you?” Melissa prodded, leading Sonya to a chair. Serene, like the pictures of Mary under the cross. Sonya stared at her, trying to detect fissures in her blankness. She found none.

“I’m so sorry, Melissa.”

“Working?”

Sonya wanted to hit her. Your baby, she wanted to scream. There’s something so wrong with your baby.

“Yeah. Can I get you a coffee or something?” Sonya asked wildly. “Let me bring you guys something. Craig?”

The baby mewled, and Craig recoiled as if she were a grease fire. There was a hitch in the beeping of the monitors, a collective wince.

“Can you get her something?” Melissa asked everyone and no one. “Something to make her sleep?”

Now, Sonya was beginning to understand better, beginning to crave a willow switch, the scarred backside. The self-flagellators had told her during the interview: The devil is inside you. He touched you, and they pointed at the scabs on her face. You need to beat him out.

“Little blue Jay,” Melissa’s mother said. Melissa jerked in response.

“Don’t call her that. That’s not her name. It’s Jay. Just Jay.”

Sonya raised her eyes from the tile, skipping over Jay-Just-Jay, and scanned the room.

No one knew but her that Melissa hadn’t named her baby after the bird. This made Sonya too guilty to breathe, too guilty to be inside herself. She went out into the hallway and everyone left her be: the nurses, the doctors, the men in wheelchairs with skin like candle wax.

—

It had happened before Sonya went to Mizzou. They had been hanging off Melissa’s bed. Melissa was longer, less round, the faintest hint of a tan on her chapped skin. Her hair just brushed the carpet. She hadn’t had to cut it yet. It must have been around the time she started Basic Training. Her last visit home. She turned to Sonya, grinned.

“I missed you,” she said. “I don’t get to hang out with any girls anymore.”

Sonya was struck by how eye contact was the same upside down as it was right-side up.

“Would you do me a favor?” Sonya said, remembering the tires. Melissa nodded.

“Punch me in the stomach.”

They were both quiet, then did that exchange girls can do with their eyes—Are you sure? How far? You weren’t safe?— all at once. Sonya dug her long, piano fingers into her hand, palms cut with thick fault lines.

“Please,” she said.

Melissa stood up, dismounted. Gravity had done this thing to her eyes that nighttime did to the neighbors’ lawns. She grabbed her car keys.

“Come on,” she said. Sonya followed.

Melissa handled the whole transaction. Filled in the papers. Swatted away Sonya’s hand when she offered to pay. Got her a diet Dr. Pepper, too.

In the aisle of the drugstore, Sonya washed it down. She wasn’t sure if this sort of thing allowed grieving, but Melissa put on Tupac on the way home, mouthing along— I was raised to be strong— and pretended Sonya was only hiccupping from the soda.

—

Sonya sat on the floor smelling her knees, thinking of the raw pink thing in the incubator, like a peeled crawfish. Somewhere in the wing, a self-playing piano started a rendition of “Amazing Grace.”

“Honey?”

The nurse had deep-set smile lines down her face, making canals to her chin. Her scrubs strained around her thighs as she squatted next to Sonya. They didn’t get many sick babies at the VA; the nurse must be used to men who demanded final cigarettes and asked for a peek of her panties.

“Honey, you’re gonna want to go back in.”

“No,” Sonya said. “I’m not even supposed to be here.”

She wiped herself with the hem of her shirt, all too aware of the bacteria she was spreading around her face, of the deep-rooted cysts stirring, hungry, in her cheeks.

The nurse stared at her, looked straight into her acne.

“The family is going to say goodbye.”

Sonya just shook her head, like a child. She had to leave. There was a chrome strip across from her that magnified the crustacean on her forehead, just above her eyebrow, that had been throbbing earlier in the day. While in the room, it must have erupted. She touched it, prepared for pus, and came away dry.

The nurse left, her sneakers chirping down the hallway. Someone else slid down next to her in the hallway. The Buccaneers jersey.

“Why are you here?” Melissa said.

I’m sorry I never stayed in touch. I’m sorry I wasn’t nicer growing up. I’m sorry my face looks like this. I’m sorry your baby looks like that. I’m mostly sorry because your baby looks like that.

“You took me to the clinic,” she said instead. “Summer after high school.”

She slumped a little, against Sonya. It was the first time she saw Melissa’s posture waver all day, saw her at sixteen again, pictured her fat and smiling.

“She was premature.”

Sonya knew a little about premature babies, assumed that the skin hadn’t developed for Melissa’s. That it was born raw. Without waiting for a response, Melissa rolled up her sleeve to the crook of her elbow.

“Look,” Melissa said. Sonya started.

“Fucking look.”

Under the baby weight and the buttermilk complexion, she hadn’t caught it. But in cloying hallway light she saw it: skin clinging to little bruises in the crease of her arm, veins thick and sagging, like telephone wires.

“Jesus,” Sonya breathed. “Melissa.”

Sonya raised her nails to her face on impulse.

“Don’t pick,” Melissa said absently. “It’ll scar.”

It wasn’t Craig that looked like the Evangelicals; no, that must have been a reflection. A strip of chrome. It was Melissa who was mad; Melissa who was rabid. Pupils tight and shiny, like the exoskeleton of a palmetto bug.

“Are you . . . now? In the hospital?”

“We’re going to do it,” Melissa said, as if that were an explanation. “Say goodbye.”

How could she have missed it? The eyes, the skin, all wrong. Not a pregnancy glow—a curtain of sweat. Withdrawal, sickly sweet. And guilt, guilt, guilt—whole body shaking like Plexiglas in a storm.

“Will you come?”

Did she have a choice?

—

Melissa’s mother took photos of it that would surely be posted on Facebook, all pink and shiny. It made Sonya want to hurl. Once, one of her mother’s dog had dragged in a squirrel, a plump thing, split at the seams, spilling maggots. It reminded her of that.

The nurse was posed in the corner, pressed up against the wall. You could only focus either slightly right or left of the carnage, most choosing to keep their brimming eyes on their sneakers.

Sonya stared at Melissa, noticed a tremor, a hand shaking like a screen door. An unfocus in her yellowed eyes. Craig clutched at his wife, and she became the space between his fingers. The nurse asked her a question, soft, and she bowed like a young birch. Sonya could have sworn the baby cracked what would have been an eye, stared at Sonya through the equipment, through the tubes: picking her out.

Sonya had collided her bike with a taxicab. She had passed kidney stones, watched her mother pass kidney stones. She had been slapped during sex. She remembered the big pad they had given her in the clinic for residual bleeding, like a diaper, the way she cramped for days after. Had seen pictures of children with legs blown off and women, branded, for their last names. But nothing like Melissa’s mother, thumb on the record button, as the parents each kissed the bundle on what would have been its forehead.

The nurse hummed. The beeping ceased. Craig drew away. Melissa didn’t remove her lips, stood hunched for a long time, over the gore, over the tubes, over what would have been the nose.

Sonya once saw a man jump in front of a train, saw him blast into pink mist—had to sit in the shower afterward for hours. She wondered all day, Had it hurt?— yes. This was worse.

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The Word of Several Million Years

A meditation on shifting ideas of being home: where it begins and ends. Of being right and wrong: how we lie about the difference.

Animation, music, and sound by Morgan Joseph Hamilton

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I Tell My Twin Sister if I Come Back after I Die,

it sure as hell ain’t gonna be to visit

as a pesky fly, obsessively orbiting her head while

she kneels, nose-pinched, to de-poop the litter box.

Or a squirrel, like the one she calls Mom

whenever it pauses halfway up the maple

to stare through the kitchen window as she lights

a cigarette: I know, I know—I promise I’ll quit!

If we’re granted the power to return, to embody

some other kind of creature, why would it be

those two ducks who claim her pool every June?

Okay . . . so if they are Grandma and Grandpa,

what do you think they’re trying to communicate

through the shit and feathers you skim out daily?

You remember how they loved to swim, she insists,

when I suggest it’s the endless supply of breadcrumbs

she scatters, not reincarnation, bringing them back.

Well, if I return, I assure her, it’ll be as a bear—

not at all native to her suburban town—a big one,

who claws a perfect M for Michael into the side

of her shed. So there’s no uncertainty it’s me.

Oh my god! Don’t you dare, she says. That shed cost

a fortune! But . . . feel free to carve it into the maple.

What makes you think I’m going first anyway? I ask.

Has that fly you call Pop been telling you something?

Clean the litter box for me, she says. And ask him yourself.

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Hidden Lives

Bloodroot, by Annemarie Ní Churreáin
Doire Press, 2017
72 pages, paper, $13.99

While the quote is often misattributed to William Butler Yeats, it was the French surrealist poet Paul Éluard who wrote, “Il y a assurément un autre monde, mais il est dans celui-ci”: There is another world, but it is in this one. It does, however, sound like Yeats, as the quote reinforces the popular view of the grand Celtic poet, the one who celebrates the unseen faerie life, recovering the old stories of the Tuatha dé Danann and the Sidhe. Of course, for Irish poets of the twentieth century, it became a weighty thing, this deep register between the mythic, the landscape, the history, and the poetic voice. And for women Irish poets, an exclusionary thing.

So, to come across Annemarie Ní Churreáin’s first book of poetry, Bloodroot, published by Doire Press, I return to Éluard’s quote. Ní Churreáin is no surrealist, but she does look for the life and lives that have been hidden, removed, erased, lives that still are apparent in this world. She accomplishes this achievement with exquisite craft and unrelenting attention, poem by poem. To find the other world in this one, Ní Churreáin suspends her readers in a tight, liminal space, where we must take great time and care to become still and to reflect, so that we see our own belonging, our own alienation.

The poetry happens even before you open the book. First, the title and its sonic qualities: Just two syllables, each ending on a hard consonant, but then that slipknot of “oo,” the short vowel in the first syllable, a hard and ugly thud, and the long open version of it in the second syllable, an open and soaring cry that is clipped short with that stopped “t.” Such dexterous language will pervade each poem once the cover is opened. Second, the title and its possible references: a medicinal flower whose roots ooze a red sap; a single root that is the life force of a plant, like a taproot or a blood feather for a bird; or a root that feeds from blood, or has been drowned in blood. All those associations fill the book.

The book is separated into three, tight, distinct sections, thematically united: where the poet traverses familial terrain, and then into troubled (and for me recent) cultural histories of Ireland, and then sojourns into India and Florida. Annemarie Ní Churreáin, a native of the boglands of northwest Donegal, is very much the world citizen, evidenced in her receiving several international fellowships and residencies, including those from the Akademie Schloss Solitude, the Jack Kerouac House, and Hawthornden Castle. The thematic breadth of her poetry is thus hardly surprising. Yet, each poem is discretely fashioned, built on its own sharp and unforgiving terms, in language clear, unfiltered, and yet highly wrought. While I have seen some readers say how they glide through Bloodroot, reading it all in one sitting, I am stunned by the poems. I read one or two an evening, and they trouble me, stay with me. Another one would overwhelm me.

For instance, consider the way Ní Churreáin constructs a brief lyric in “The Warning,” a poem governed by such a strong, unyielding sequence of voices (just two lines each), but by a disciplined and harrowing parallel structure. Here’s the poem in its entirety:

Give us your child, the Pica bird said
or else you go to hell.

Give me what I want, the child said
or else I’ll tear this House down.

Obey house rules, the House said
or else this House will break your bones.

Tell my story, the bone said
or else we’re all going to burn.

Despite its tightly faceted structure, there are slight, slight fissures in the poem, where the “child” and the “bone” are not capitalized, and the brilliant shifting of pronouns in the second line of each couplet: second person, first person singular, third person, and first person plural. The poem’s brevity and simplicity and personified voices also suggest something of the nursery rhyme. And then at the heart of the poem is the urgent and necessary call for witnessing, to tell the story or else. I am left wondering about whether or not we’ll all burn anyway after the telling, after the witnessing.

This attention to language partly emanates from the fact that Ní Churreáin is bilingual, a product of a colonized history, and that she is from the hinter boglands of western Ireland. Weighted with the ghosts of her foremothers, to whom the book is dedicated, the simple, hard language is so piercingly employed to speak the truths of the hidden or shamed lives of Irish women, famously the cases of Ann Lovett and Joanne Hayes, two young women in the 1980s who suffered unwanted pregnancies with one resulting in death and the other in pillorying. Ní Churreáin’s is an uncompromising and bold vision: told with a scalded clarity that makes me think of Joan Didion, with a necessity that makes me think of Muriel Rukeyser. But this is all Ní Churreáin, on her own terms.

I come back time and again to another brief lyric, “Cult,” as a grounding moment for the collection. In it, she investigates the double legend of Brigid, the pre-Christian Irish goddess of healing and inspiration who was later appropriated and canonized as St. Brigid. In County Cavan, a pagan cult continued to celebrate Brigid, worshipping a stone head capturing her three faces: one a smithy, one a herder, and one a healer. In the 1840s, a local priest was said to have “lost” the stone head in Roosky Lough. Ní Churreáin plainly notes:

This is what happens to women who brew medicine,
who bend iron, who drive cattle on their own land.

Such powerful women are not only appropriated, even canonized, but then thereafter must be erased. And the poem ends on defiance (and a string of hard “d” consonants), in lines that the place the poet among the original sisterhood, the resistant cult:

Dreamless now, I touch the water in the font,
cold as medals, streaked with my own blood.

Here, the poet unsentimentally faces the world as it is given, “[d]reamless,” while claiming her own agency and asserting her connection to her past, her real, elemental kin.

I am leaving out so much accomplishment that is evident in this remarkable book, both in terms of Annemarie Ní Churreáin’s craft and vision. There is much more for any reader to discover. This first book gives promise of a vital, important poet whose voice denudes our convenient illusions.

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The Cleanest Hands

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My Father’s Monsters

1. Here’s how it started: my father, for reasons unknown to me at the time, would periodically come home, loudly insisting, Jeremiah, I saw a monster, and although he was never drunk, and it never seemed malicious—I never thought he was making fun of me—I never believed him, even at a young age, when he would crow about monsters that were very much in my orbit (he pivoted early on from Frankensteins or Mummies or Creatures from Various-Colored Lagoons and started conjuring up hair-raising encounters with beasts from Gremlins or An American Werewolf in London, stopping thankfully short of meeting Freddy Krueger or anything from Alien or The Thing).[note]The strange thing was, he wasn’t even a huge monster movie fan; he eschewed normal ‘dad’ taste, had no patience for Westerns or war movies, and oddly enough preferred staid dramas like Gentleman’s Agreement, and in the 1980s he acquired a low-grade obsession with My Dinner with Andre.[/note]

2. This continued unabated until it became a source of concern, and then, more powerfully, more keenly, embarrassment, as an assortment of friends would come by to pretend to do homework, only to find themselves in the inquisitorial hands of Alec Sutton, who would casually ask, as one would the weather, which frightful creation of George A. Romero or John Carpenter or Wes Craven or Roger Corman or Rick Baker or Stan Winston or Ray Harryhausen or Stephen King or H. P. Lovecraft or Horace Walpole (as if any of us had read Walpole!) or Clive Barker or Ray Bradbury (now he was reaching) or Edgar Allan Poe really gave my friend the heebie-jeebies, the screaming mimis, the willies, and whatever answer my father received from his poor subject would (almost) invariably produce a reaction somewhere along the lines of Well, funny you should say that, because the other night at a stop sign and off he would go, in an admittedly impressive display of extemporizing the chilling proximity in which he had found himself to something from an altogether more ghoulish version of our own world.[note]My father didn’t do this more than once, and most of my friends found it either endearing or just the cost of hanging out with me, but poor Freddy Mackenzie told my father that the car in Christine had given him nightmares, and after hearing that my father had seen a ’58 Plymouth Fury driving by our school with no one behind the wheel, Freddy turned as white as if he’d been blood-let, and both Sutton men got a stern dressing-down from Freddy’s mother.[/note]

3. Once I found my father casually flipping through an issue of Fangoria—on the cover was a Sasquatch, which I never found frightening and therefore never made it into my father’s bestiary—and this I took to be his admission that the jig was up, that he knew that I knew the monsters weren’t real; he didn’t try to hide the magazine, just continued flipping through pages of creature features while asking me in a disinterested tone how my day was going, and it’s not until writing this that I realized reading Fangoria and Eerie and For Monsters Only was his way of centering himself.[note]I’d like to tell you that my father died and willed me a box of musty, dog-eared penny dreadfuls, but like I said, the man was never one for horror, and I’m fairly certain that most of those magazines wound up in the trash.[/note]

4. One time, when I was nine or ten, my father roped his friend Lee in on the act, and Lee told me: “You know, Jem”—he was the only one who called me that, and I always hated it, but it wasn’t for many years that I realized I hated it because I am not and was not a character from Flannery O’Connor or Harper Lee—”all that stuff your dad says, well, it’s not bullshit”—and here my father winced, for he did not swear around me back then, but he did not interrupt—”it’s all true; why, once he and I were on our way to the b—to church”—I knew he was going to say “bar,” but he felt the need to cover himself after his bullshit gaffe, and my suspicions were confirmed when I saw his furtive glance at my father, as if for approval and permission, and in that glance I saw just how much my father meant to Lee Hayward—”and we saw an honest-to-goodness vampire, with the cape, the fangs, the amulet, the whole nine yards”—and here he just kind of trailed off, and while his effort was a weak one, I could see that it meant a lot to my father that Lee had made an effort at all, and I understood then, or at least I thought I understood, the strange nature of male friendship, which sometimes requires you to lie to your friend’s son.[note]One of the only truly nice things I ever did (everyone thinks of themselves as nice, I believe, but few people take the time to quantify it) was to visit Lee Hayward in the hospital after he had nearly blinded himself at work; he couldn’t see very well and was muted by painkillers and therefore couldn’t recognize my voice, so I told him, “It’s Jem Sutton.”[/note]

5. When I was in college, my father told me that he had seen the Headless Horseman—which I think was meant to appeal to my newfound sensibilities (I had recently declared myself a Classics major[note]I know, I know, shut up.[/note]), but instead of meeting him halfway and asking about the Jack-o’-lantern head, I tore into him, telling him that first of all, Irving wasn’t what anyone would exactly call a Classics author, I was reading shit like Virgil and Sophocles and Euripides and Chaucer, and I didn’t appreciate being made fun of . . . okay, yes, this was probably the meanest thing I ever said to Alec Sutton, but I never told him I didn’t believe him, that he never saw the Headless Horseman and I was sick of the bullshit with the monsters (my father and I swore around each other by now), so, mean though I was, I never, even then, broke his heart.

6. When Shea and I had kids—Murphy and Connor—they were a little more circumspect around Grampy Alec, not as believing of his tall tales, a trait for which I blame their mother, who was always analytical and practical in a way that, for some reason, deeply turned me on (in hindsight, Grampy Alec might have blown his cover early on when he insisted that he saw “a few Pokémons”[note]The conversation afterwards, in which I explained the taxonomy of Pokémon to my father, is and was the most uncomfortable experience of my life, but I had to admire the nearly anthropological curiosity with which he approached the subject.[/note] by the corner store; the eye-rolls produced, in unison, by Murph and Con are still the greatest insults I’ve ever seen).

7. This put me in a bit of a bind: you don’t want your kids to think that their old man’s old man is a liar, but you also don’t want to lie to the kids, so you go along with it, much to your wife’s consternation (which later, to her credit, becomes bemusement), but everyone has fun with it, and no one gets too scared.[note]Con was spared the sight of Pennywise the Clown, thanks to his mother’s intervention; she (correctly) pointed out that it would “scare the everloving shit out of him.”[/note]

8. I should clarify the word scared: my father’s intention was never to scare me (I never found any rubber snakes or spiders in my bed), and I never was scared (okay, maybe a few times when I was very young, but what child wouldn’t be frightened by the most trustworthy person in their life saying that he had just come from a meeting with the Swamp Thing?)—I think, ultimately, he was just trying to be my friend, to swap stories, to bullshit the way he must have done with Lee Hayward.[note]I should clarify further, because I feel like I’m digging myself a hole: these stories never made me distrust my father.[/note]

9. Only once did an actual monster make an appearance, and here’s how it happened: my mother asked if I wanted to take a walk (Red Flag #1: my mother, although a fit woman, never spontaneously took walks) while my father was conspicuously absent (Red Flag #2: my father was never one to leave the house after he had returned to it), so out we went, down Larkspur Court, to the east, and out from the alleyway, why, look what it is, some Monster from Planet X, plainly a hazmat suit from a costume shop accompanied by a latex alien mask (most likely purchased from the selfsame costume shop [Red Flag #3: my father worked around the corner from Herb Crowne’s year-round costume shop]), replete with bulging, purple eyes and mottled gray skin.[note]My father never liked sci-fi, so I’m not sure why he went with this particular outfit as his first; there must have been a sale.[/note]

10. My mother mock-screamed and ran away at a pace quick enough for me to catch up to her, which I did as well, once I realized that it was what I was expected to do; I don’t remember my own reaction beyond that, but I really, really hope I played along.[note]My father would never break character and address it, nor would I bring it up, so all I have in this instance is hope that I made him happy.[/note]

11. Later, my father’s monsters became upsettingly real, and they announced their presence with beeps and hoarse exhales and the rasp of my mother’s voice, like sandpaper grinding a pearl to dust.[note]Rachel Holcomb Sutton died at the age of 51, and it hurts like a motherfucker to this day.[/note]

12. Monsters stopped seeking my father out after that.[note]Truthfully, I started to miss the monsters, and a few weeks after the funeral, I tried telling him I’d seen Pinhead in the frozen food aisle of Kroger’s, but he must have not have heard me because he said nothing.[/note]

13. Kids are harder to scare these days, or maybe just harder to impress. Shea and I—she’s gotten in on the act too—have taken to watching DIY tutorials on YouTube, in an attempt to make our own prostheses, or makeup convincing enough to make Murph and Con think that one of us is the real deal.[note]Shea and I never got great at fabricating masks, but I turned out to be something of a wunderkind with the makeup brush, and turned her into a pretty eerie facsimile of the Babadook.[/note] They’re too old to believe us, if they ever did, but that never stopped my father. He came to help us once and was almost immediately flummoxed. He dropped some mask-making impedimenta and looked at me, saying plainly, “Jesus, Jeremiah, I just told you stories.” He shook his head and laughed.

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Interview: Ha Jin

Ha Jin is the author of seven volumes of poetry, four short story collections, eight novels, and one collection of essays, and cowriter of an opera libretto. He is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including a National Book Award, two PEN/Faulkner Awards, the Townsend Prize for Fiction, and the Flanner O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Born Huefei Jin in Liaoning, China, Ha Jin served the People’s Liberation Army during the Cultural Revolution from the ages of fourteen to nineteen. Afterward, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in China before coming to the US to study at Brandeis University, where he earned his PhD and began writing poetry. While there, he witnessed the Tiananmen Massacre and decided to remain in the US and eventually to become a citizen.

When Jin decided to make his life in the US, he also decided to write in English. As he noted in “Exiled to English” in The New Yorker in 2009, he felt that “the Chinese language had been so polluted by revolutionary movements and political jargon” and that anything he wrote for a Chinese audience would be subject to censorship. Therefore, he chose English, “to preserve the integrity of my work.” Though he still focuses on issues and characters concerned with China, over the more than fifteen years that he has been writing, his English has grown more fluid and natural, and his more recent work is set more solidly in the US.

In this interview, we focus on The Boat Rocker, Ha Jin’s most recent novel, published by Pantheon in 2016. The Boat Rocker is the story of Feng Danlin, a Chinese immigrant living in New York and working as a culture reporter and writer of exposés, who sets out to reveal the corrupt network of support around a new highly touted but low-quality novel. It turns out the novel has been penned by none other than his ex-wife, Yan Haili. Needless to say, Danlin’s motives get murky. The book provides an intense, but humorous, look at not only Chinese political corruption, but US publishing shenanigans and the impact of politics even there. As always in Jin’s work, the human struggles with love, envy, and betrayal exist on the same plane as larger cultural and political ones.

Lisa Roney for The Florida Review:
One of the things that I wanted to note was that this is only the second time that you’ve set a novel completely in the US. A Free Life, in some ways, reflected your own sudden decision to immigrate to the US after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and now The Boat Rocker‘s main character is a long-term resident, as you are. I just wondered if you could talk a little bit about how your consciousness might have shifted as you, yourself, made your adult life in the US. Do you feel more embedded in life in the US? Do you still think about setting most of your work in China? How are you thinking about place in your work now?

Ha Jin:
In recent years, I think I have set my work in between, between the United States and China. In fact, the novel before this is A Map of Betrayal. The narrator is an American history professor. Part of the novel is set in China, but more than half is set in the States. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I wrote a collection of short stories that’s set in Flushing, New York [A Good Fall, Vintage International]. Basically, this is my territory—the in-between.

TFR:
I think that seems to be more and more true for more people, as people move all over the world. Even I, who have always lived in the United States, have lived in the North and the South, and there are such distinctions.

Jin:
Yes, even within the States, I can see among my students, often, they are in-between, too.

TFR:
How do you think that impacts your work in particular, living in between, writing in between?

Jin:
I think it really sharpened my sense of survival, because this is a very slippery region, and so I had to be more cautious. Also, it is by definition, marginal. I had to accept that as my condition, a condition for existence as writer, as a human being. A lot of things, I think, I knew, especially I had to figure out by myself. I can’t make a clear statement, because there’s a lot of uncertainty, but uncertainty is a part of the environment, in this space, and so that’s why I had to accept it as my own way. [Laughs]

TFR:
Has it changed as you’ve been in the US longer? Do you feel more American now?

Jin:
Yeah, I do feel that way, because I’ve been a citizen for almost twenty years now.

TFR:
My husband has been a citizen for two.

[Laughter]

Jin:
For two! From where?

TFR:
Canada.

Jin:
Canada. Oh, Canada is a great country, but you can have dual citizenship. That’s great. I wish I could. That would make life easier for me—because for me, because China does not accept the dual citizenship, I had to resolve. The door is closed. There’s no way it’d be sane for me to think of going back. There’s no way to go back. I have not been back to China for thirty-one years, ever since I came to the States. That’s the situation. I have to be very rational about this. There’s only this space now, and ahead. There’s no way to go back. It’s very hard for me to think that way.

TFR:
One of the things I loved about The Boat Rocker is that there are such great moments of humor in it, too, even as Danlin struggles with this in-between space, as you describe about yourself.

Jin:
Yes, I set out to write comically.

TFR:
What inspired you to have Danlin’s investigation focused not on just corruption in Chinese cultural life, but also on his ex-wife?

Jin:
That would make the project more exciting, more personal. Because, otherwise, it would be just a political investigation. I wanted his motivation, somehow, mixed. There’s an element of vengeance here, and he’s not perfect. He’s traumatized, but, in a way, his motivation is nuanced. That’s why—I wanted this to be more subtle.

TFR:
I thought he was a wonderfully complex character. Could you talk a little bit more about your development of him as a character?

Jin:
Yes. In fact, a lot of people think this is too bizarre, too far-fetched, but, in fact, for almost every incident here, there is a factual happening. I just unified them and picked them from different places. There were a lot of Chinese, many Chinese men I know, as soon as they arrived here, their wives gave them the divorce papers. I have a friend who was given divorce papers at the airport. There was also a freelance writer, so I combined different people in life to create a character.

TFR:
One of the things I was interested in, also, was that sometimes I felt that you do have a certain amount of sympathy for Niya and even Haili. I wonder, do you feel that a fiction writer is obligated to love and sympathize with all of their characters somehow?

Jin:
No!

[Laughter]

No, I don’t agree. Often, even when you are disgusted with a character, people like him or her. I just want to be factual, to see the psychology, the motivations, the situations. I don’t have sympathy for everyone, no. It’s impossible.

TFR:
Which is a character here that you have the least sympathy for?

Jin:
The wife, Haili, I have the least sympathy. I have more sympathy for Danlin, for Gary, even, because he’s in the dark most of the time. Niya—I can understand her, where she comes from, but she’s really somehow, brainwashed in a way. I can understand them, why they have become like that, but Danlin, I do have a sympathy for him. I can see he’s traumatized. He’s troubled.

TFR:
When I was reading all the copy about the book before reading the book itself, it was talking about him as a pure, anti-corruption kind of crusader. I was like, “I don’t think that Ha Jin believes that. I think that there’s much more subtlety to him, even as he takes up this position of investigating his ex-wife.”

Jin:
He just got into it emotionally, couldn’t get out, and just got deeper and deeper, and was in a way trapped in there.

TFR:
You deal mostly with corruption in government and culture affairs kinds of offices, but you also, especially in chapter four, you satirize the publishing world a bit. What do you think are the biggest problems in the publishing world today?

Jin:
I have a lot of sympathy for publishers. Firstly, they are businesspeople. When they publish a book, they have to think of a market, otherwise their argument is, if you’re a new author, why should I waste money, lose money on you? I do have sympathy for that. But, it really is a business world. They don’t care too much about literary merit at all. I had the experience that my first few fiction books were all published by small presses. At the time, I got a lot of rejection letters. They would say, “We like it. This well-written, but it’s too poetic, but it’s very good. I remember episodes and characters—they stay with me, but we don’t have a market. We can’t see a market for it.” In a way, sometimes publishers are near-sighted, I think. They think too much in profits. A lot of books—you don’t know. They might yet have a different life once in print.

TFR:
How do you see that influencing our literature?

Jin:
That’s why commerce, the business part, is really not about good literature. I think that there should be some kind of balance. Some publishers have been doing this—they have a special series. Even if they know they might lose money, it still is good for the press. In the long run, we don’t know what a book may do—maybe the press will benefit in the long run. Like New Directions—basically, they’re still supported by the early high-modern poets [who never made money in their time].

TFR:
You’re a teacher as well as a writer, and I wonder if you could comment about creative writing programs. There’s been so much criticism about how “writing can’t be taught” and all of that, though I think there’s also the matter of cultivating a readership, which we do through our teaching of creative writing.

Jin:
I think it’s a democratic thing. In the book, I talk about the Chinese literary operators. You have to really tow a line with the officials, you have to be very active, accepted by the powers that be. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have a chance. At least the creative writing programs are open. It’s open to everyone. We give people an equal chance.

People elsewhere may think of faculty like literary agents—this was new to many other countries. I think they, in fact, compare MFAs with other, more commercial aspects. MFA programs have done much for aspiring writers. But we don’t take money personally. We don’t benefit. We don’t get a commission from it.

[Laughter]

TFR:
You commented in your Paris Review interview in 2009 that you are open and outspoken, and that’s certainly something that I have long admired about both your work and about your reputation as a person. Why are these traits that you’ve cultivated, and in what ways do you think they’re important in addition to, obviously, allowing you to speak out about political corruption?

Jin:
As human beings, we must find some basic principles that we must go by. For instance, consistency, integrity. These are very basic principles. Otherwise, how can we act in the world? We might just get lost in our own confusion. That’s why I believe in speaking about the Tiananmen Massacre, ever since it happened. I have to keep on, continue it. I can’t cancel myself. I can’t go back on it.

TFR:
What does your knowledge of and experience of Chinese situations make you think about what’s going on in the US today?

Jin:
I think, really, China has been very aggressive in recent years. In fact, this novel is set twelve years before now, and so, at the time, China was very cautious, but China, because of the crisis in 2008, China has done well. In fact, even developed. That gives some kind of legitimacy, or justification, to the system. Basically, they’re trying to, now, denigrate democracy. The new election—basically, I think China is very happy about the results, because Trump is a businessman and has business dealings with China. The Chinese side—I think they believe he can somehow have more influence.

TFR:
Do you think that your writing will go in a direction where it approaches American politics in addition to Chinese and Chinese-American politics?

Jin:
Maybe in the future. I’m not sure. [Laughter] I’m not a political writer. That’s another reason I’ve written this—because I really wanted to make the subject personal.

TFR:
What else would you like to say about The Boat Rocker? What else was important to you about the writing of The Boat Rocker, and how does it mark the next step for you? Where are you going next?

Jin:
Stylistically, it’s different from my previous novels, because I wanted to make this somehow comic.

TFR:
Which it was.

Jin:
That was the challenge to me. Basically, I want to be serious, but at the same time entertaining. That’s my ambition.

TFR:
Great, and any news about what’s next? Are you working on a new project?

Jin:
My wife was sick, gravely sick for some years—she’s well now, but I couldn’t pounce into a long novel project. So, I’ve been writing a lot of poetry in Chinese. I published two books of poems in Chinese, and then I re-wrote some of the poems in English, so basically I have a book of English-language poems I’ve been working on. [A Distant Center, Copper Canyon Press, 2018].

TFR:
I wish we had another hour to talk about poetry.

Jin:

Yes.

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